MEd (Digital Technologies)

About

My role

During 2020 and 2021, I worked as an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia. In this role, I mainly taught in units in the Digital Technologies (DT) stream of the Master of Education program (MEd), which was a degree program for in-service teachers upskilling for teaching and leading the implementation of the DT curriculum. At that time, the program was unique in that it was the only MEd program we were aware of that was focussed on content and pedagogy for the Australian DT curriculum.

My colleague Sujatha Gunja and I worked together on the design and teaching of the DT units in the Master of Education (Digital Technologies) program - or MEd (DT) for short - with support from colleagues working at the Australian Computing Academy (ACA). The ACA had staff with subject matter expertise in DT, experienced computing teachers and members of the original DT curriculum writing team.

The background and design of the MEd (DT)

Sujatha and I wrote a report about the background of the MEd (DT) program and the design of the assessment and learning activities, which you can read on this page. This program was unfortunately not offered to new applicants after 2020 and has been discontinued at the University of Sydney, with the last student expected to finish in mid-2023. Since 2022, I have worked as a Casual Academic in the School of Education and Social Work, supervising MEd (DT) students who started their degree in 2020 and are completing their capstone projects.

MEd (DT) students generally had to complete eight different units in their degree, with four of those being focussed on DT content. We were responsible for lecturing those four units and supervising students in their capstone project unit. The MEd (DT) students also usually completed three units from other areas in Education, including the Learning Sciences and Educational Leadership.

Learn more about the MEd (DT)

The MEd (DT) at the University of Sydney was an excellent and innovative program and I feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to teach in it. The program addressed the current need for more expert DT teachers by upskilling teachers in DT content and pedagogy, as well as helping them develop strategies to support their colleagues learning to teach DT. There was also a lot of effort and care that went into the design of the units, which balanced DT content and pedagogy, and incorporated findings and best-practices from Computing Education Research (CER).

I was very fortunate to teach alongside, and learn from, my colleague Sujatha Gunja, as well as colleagues from the ACA and the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. The report that Sujatha and I wrote about the program after the first year it ran is available from this page. If you would like to learn more about the program and/or are working on similar programs, I recommend reading that report. I'm also happy to chat about the MEd (DT) program and share our experiences running it, so feel free to get in touch about it.