Creative Digital Pedagogies for Student Engagement

Abstract

To prepare for the uncertainties of work in the future, Malaysian students need to be equipped with digital skills and be creative and innovative, which are urgently needed as the effects of globalization and IR4.0 continue to transform the economy. While digital creativity is critical for the workforce of the future, teachers and instructors seem to lack the pedagogies and skills to encourage creative behaviour among students. Hence, the development of human capital of the future should emphasize the reduction of the digital skills gap in the workforce. Hence, this chapter recommends improving the technology pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) among teachers and instructors based on an integrated digital competency framework to develop digital creativity among students, which include empowering learners, creating new knowledge, strengthening connectivity in communities, and designing solutions and computational thinking. Other suggestions for tools and applications for these approaches include the use of collaborative applications for learning and virtual reality, as well as problem solving approaches using visual programming applications. To achieve this, administrators of educational institutions, teachers and instructors need to be made aware of the importance of digital creativity. Teacher education programmes need to be restructured to ensure that competences to cultivate digital creativity is encouraged by every teacher. To prepare for the uncertainties of work in the future, Malaysian students need to be equipped with digital skills and be creative and innovative, which are urgently needed as the effects of globalization and IR4.0 continue to transform the economy. This chapter recommends improving the technology pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) among teachers and instructors based on an integrated digital competency framework to develop digital creativity among students, which include empowering learners, creating new knowledge, strengthening connectivity in communities, and designing solutions and computational thinking. Digital tools can optimize and expand connections with other learners. In addition, the interactions enable the sharing of cultures among learners of different background, broaden mutual understanding and examine issues and problems from multiple viewpoints, and work towards common goals. Computational thinking is a way of thinking which involves the decomposition of a problem, abstracting the main ideas, algorithmic design, debugging, iteration and generalization.