How can educators leverage tech tools and innovative approaches more effectively? This central question drove President Thomas Bailey and faculty to launch the Digital Futures Institute (DFI), an interdisciplinary hub for digital innovation to support teaching, learning and scholarship, in 2020. TC Today sat down to discuss the Institute’s mission, ed tech today and what’s ahead with Lalitha Vasudevan, DFI’s Managing Director, Vice Dean for Digital Innovation, and Professor of Technology & Education; and Coterminous Professor Charles Lang, DFI’s Senior Executive Director. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

DFI is approaching its five-year anniversary. What kind of challenges have been the focus of your work? 

Charles Lang (CL): The two driving forces conceptually were digital transformation and then COVID at that point. We were tasked with, “How do we get our arms around digital learning moving forward?”

Lalitha Vasudevan (LV): DFI was in the works before the pandemic hit, and — as Charles said — it shaped what our first couple years were focused on, but we were really grounded in wanting to bring together service and scholarship. Part of that meant being responsive to what people were asking for, but part of that mission also meant providing our community with on-ramps. In other words, it's one thing to have information about online and hybrid teaching, but you actually have to create opportunities for the faculty to engage with pedagogy and tools in hands-on ways, including approaches that they don’t already envision. Of course, the vision for DFI was always much larger than that: to grow intentionally and responsively to different audiences. So what do students need? What do alumni need? What do staff need? And that helped frame our initial four focus areas for research and practice: digital pedagogy, tech for social good, play and multimodal scholarship. We are developing a new area of focus on the societal and educational impacts of artificial intelligence, which is similarly both responsive and forward looking.

Let’s talk more about multimodal scholarship — the use of multimedia and non-traditional mediums to advance learning. For those who grew up with traditional research and textbook-based learning, why is multimodal scholarship so important?

CL: Our work is responding to the world that now exists, where multimodality is the norm and the expectation. Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. So how do educators and researchers, within that context, leverage multimedia in a way that is going to help learners the most, and maybe combat some of the negative side effects of the technology in our lives now? 

LV: To echo Charles' point about the increasingly multiple ways that people are communicating, multimodal learning builds on what people are already bringing to a classroom and asks them to produce new forms of outputs or use different practices, more so than more traditional approaches might. Part of what we are also seeing with faculty who are engaging in their own multimodal research is that they're also finding new ways to ask different types of questions. Thus, we have worked to institutionalize structured support for multimodal pedagogy and research, or what we have identified as multimodal scholarship, to provide resources and community for those seeking to expand their practices of seeing and making meaning with the use of emerging technologies and creative media tools.

DFI also works closely with teachers to help them develop ed tech skills, particularly around AI in the classroom. What have you learned from those experiences about what lies ahead?

LV: As far as AI is concerned, emerging technologies are sometimes inserted into educational conversations with the aspiration that they're going to suddenly solve something. The reality is that life keeps changing and new challenges surface. What DFI is trying to do is to be responsive to needs while providing stable structures to experiment with that shifting landscape.

CL: We need to play to the strengths of our community, we can be ground zero for the implications of AI for education.

LV: We know that when people are able to see, listen and be in community, that changes the way they're able to learn. What TC brings to the table is a humane and pedagogically grounded lens to the conversation about AI development and integration in schools. Teachers and principals have seen products foisted on them for decades. And the same is going to be true of AI. TC as an institution has an obligation to raise critical questions on how these technologies are applied and to equip people with knowledge so they can make intentional choices. It's humans who are going to advance AI.

What’s next for DFI?

LV: As DFI approaches its five-year anniversary, we are aware that the world has changed dramatically in that time, both technologically and sociopolitically. The need for educators, researchers, and learners to be savvy in their assessment and use of technology has never been more urgent, and we aim to address that need through a range of impactful and interactive experiences and outputs — workshops for faculty, internships for students, translating research with media like podcasts and video series, and immersive exhibitions that are open to all. We are grateful for our partnerships with faculty, students, staff, and the organization and industry partners that have made this work possible. Looking ahead, we would like to expand some of the work with teachers and young people that we've recently piloted, and reach more audiences, including our alumni who are having impact around the world, and who see the value of providing opportunities for teachers and students and faculty to be creative, to be imaginative in their thinking. That's going to help us scale up, innovate and do more for the communities that we work with.