What is digitalisation?
So what is digitalisation that we will cover in this training material? Digitalisation is so widely used that we first state we deal only with digitalisation in education and training. Definitions here are rather political and aim driven like:
"digitalisation of learning is a way to skip geographical barriers as it opens up to international audiences without traveling costs and without the logistics of having to gather in the same place"
(source: https://ec.europa.eu/epale/en/content/digitalisation-university-continuing-education-technology-content-and-pedagogy)
But it is not enough. Digitalisation in education and training is also quite a vague, if not fuzzy term. So in this material we will deal with digitalisation of learning resources, or in other words, learning content. The definitions are still vague, like:
"digitization of the study materials used in curricula"
(source: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160301005172/en/Digitization-Learning-Content-Expected-Boost-Education-PC)
But what do we exactly mean by digitalisation? In this material we will speak about digitalisation not only by:
- recording or
- converting and
- storing original resources,
but also
- organising,
- meta-tagging and
- storing them
in a logical, researchable way. In some very special, but still often used cases like in evaluation-type content, digitalisation also means, that the digital format may represent and fulfil some internally "programmed" logicstics of the resource, for example branching to the good and the bad answer feedback without human intervention.
Examples for digitalisation:
Text
(source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-free-ocr-software-tools-to-convert-your-images-into-text-nb/)
If we speak about an English text, it can be in hand-written form. Digitalisation of this resource is not only scanning (photo copying) and storing it in a photo-realistic way, but recognising it and attaching a trans-cript with – say- ASCII character set, and also by giving some extra orientation data (meta-data) of the author, content, date, etc. Of course, the original form of the manuscript may be interesting later for hand writing research, or any other reason, but the learning content will be most probably by the processable character set that can be easily referred, translated, quoted, or processed otherwise by machine.
Audio
(source: http://www.topapps.net/android/top-voice-recording-apps-for-android.html/)
If we speak about an oral presentation or speech, digitalisation can be the direct digital recording of the voice, but also the digital conversion of an earlier recorded analogue tape. In both ways quality digital audio have to be meta-tagged as in the case of text, but also recognised and recorded (stored) in script form to help the earlier mentioned references, translations and even simple “sub-titling” for situations where sound can not be used. (people with limited hearing, lack of earphones, public places where we would disturb others)
Test
(Source: https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Quiz_module)
If we speak about a closed graphical test, we do not only scan the text and graphics, but we also programme the (hot area) of the “right answer” so in case of a testing situation, the learner’s click (or tap on touch screen), will initiate a branch to the right or bad answer feedback.
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