Community-based Service-Learning and Digital Media

Abstract

This teaching practice report looks ahead to the learning experiences of students relating to the use of digital media and their collaborative knowledge work within a service-learning project. This project takes into account the increasing digitalisation in higher education, in particular, its didactic-methodical, technological, and organisational implementation, as well as their integration into appropriate learning management systems. Undergraduate students initiated a crowdfunding campaign for young people aged between 12 and 18 in a rural town under the authors’ direction in the bachelor’s degree program “Social Pedagogics and Management” at a University of Applied Science in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. The two-semester course included a flipped classroom concept linked to a community-based learning approach that not only allowed for development of students’ digital literacy skills and a deepening of their theoretical knowledge in the field of alternative financing possibilities in human service organisations but also helped to enhance students’ social engagement. In this context, the learning management system ILIAS provided not only an appropriate digital knowledge architecture for the service-learning project but also offered a wide range of eLearning opportunities, a platform for multi-local project work, and the documentation of ePortfolios. This practice report aims at a short description of the teaching project itself, its implementation, and the results of the mentioned learning scenario and will conclude by summarising how the quality of technology-enhanced higher education pedagogy could be improved in future.