Recently I was at a meeting with a group of experienced educators looking at ways to engage students with a co-curricula project, when I heard the refrain “I’m not IT” used as a reason not to create an equivalent experience for online students.

Though working for TechDems, I’ve uttered these words myself.

To be brutally honest, I’ve used this refrain when my digital literacy skills don’t match the complexity of the task at hand. Engaging students in online learning is, at times, an unfathomable task. The number of new articles that come through each week on my google scholar alert would suggest that there isn’t an easy answer, or a secret recipe to engaging students online. IT specialists eagerly recount hundreds of different tools and their multiple affordances, yet this well-intentioned enthusiasm often makes it seem all the more difficult. Afterall, I’m not IT.

And I’m not alone. Earlier this year, Inna Golovanova, Nadezhda Telegina, and Olga Donetskaya published a study entitled A Study into the Requirements of Digital Society and Educators’ Digital Literacy. They suggest “the efficiency and quality of teaching depends on overcoming the existing digital divide in teachers’ competences” (555). The cause for this digital divide was explored and articulated:

“The digital transformation of education is part of global changes in society caused by the rapid development of new technologies. Their impact is so extensive and far-reaching, that education has not yet fully caught up with them. It cannot always anticipate changes and adapt to them systematically, appropriately and methodologically. It has taken time to realise that it is not just a matter of digitalisation of the educational process. Rather, the issue is one of systematic and in-depth transformation.” (556)

The study did not question the competence of educators as teachers, academics, or people. Instead, it explored the role of educators within a system responding to sustained rapid change, with educators and education systems unable to match the speed at which these changes occur. Because, we’re not IT.

But what role do we as educators play in this? How can we bridge, or even acknowledge, our own digital divide? Should we try?

Would ‘being IT’ mean we had the courage to attempt new technology without the fear of failing? Or become an early adopter? Or even reach out for help with online student engagement?

After all, with 70% of our students studying online, and 100% of our students having their learning shaped by StudyDesk as much as by their course examiner, doesn’t being an educator mean we’re all IT?

Katrina Cutcliffe