3 From practice to theory

“A tendency among academic teachers is to stuff their curriculum with content, burdening themselves with the task of transmitting vast amounts of knowledge bulk and their students of absorbing and reproducing this bulk. In contrast, a focus on threshold concepts enables teachers to make refined decisions about what is fundamental to a grasp of the subject they are teaching. It is a ‘less is more’ approach to curriculum design.” (Cousin, 2006, 4)

Usually, we learn the theory first and then explore how it applies to practice. The design of this module follows loosely a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) approach as already explained. This means we will go from practice to theory.

All learning in this module is experiential. Scenarios will be used for learning in facilitated groups using characteristics of PBL. We are not cramming the module full of stuff you can find anywhere and learn on your own and with others. We are focusing on the threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 20023; Cousin, 2006) that are fundamental in digital education and education more widely.

Before engaging with each scenario in small groups you are invited to work through a set of Warm-up activities individually and then discuss. The warm-up activities are intended to introduce you to each thematic unit and also help you to make important connections to your own professional context. They intend to trigger critical reflection and help you also work towards the assignment for this module which uses an assessment as learning approach that enables you to complete it progressively fully integrated into your learning process (Yan and Yang, 2022) while also having a life after the completion of the module. The assessment therefore can be characterised as renewable (Wiley, 2016; Lazzara et al., 2024)