The Bass Digital Education Fellowship program is a joint effort by Duke Learning Innovation and the Duke Graduate School that began in 2019. This academic year, the Digital Education program welcomed its second cohort of Bass fellows. These six fellows took part in a year-long fellowship that offers PhD students an opportunity to collaborate on digital projects in partnership with Duke faculty and under the guidance of Learning Innovation.
Anderson Hagler, a PhD candidate in History, began working with Duke Learning Innovation in Summer 2020 while teaching his own online course. His own experiences as an instructor allowed him to work with faculty and fellow graduate students at Learning Innovation, as he consulted with them as they prepared for the Fall 2020 semester. As a 2020-2021 Bass Digital Education Fellow, Hagler took these experiences and worked on a variety of projects related to online education, particularly in relation to asynchronous communication.
In addition to working directly with a history course in Fall 2020 as a consultant, two of Hagler’s major projects during his time as a Digital Education Fellow dealt with running training and producing materials for online education: graduate student training and examining the tool VoiceThread.
Graduate Student Training
Alongside the director of the Bass Digital Education Fellowship program and Learning Innovation consultant Sophia Stone, EdD, Learning Innovation and Graduate School staff, other Bass Digital Education Fellows and other graduate students, Hagler developed content for the Online Teaching Assistant Skills Training series and the Graduate Academy course “Online Teaching.”
One of Hagler’s major contributions to the “Online Teaching” Graduate Academy course was sharing his own online course materials as an example. This included example Sakai materials, demo lessons and an interactive tutorial of how to use VoiceThread.
Providing a Guide to Using VoiceThread
In Spring 2021, Hagler further developed his expertise in digital education tools by speaking to instructors and staff across Duke in multiple disciplines to help put together teaching materials around the digital education tool VoiceThread. VoiceThread is a Duke-supported tool that supports asynchronous communication with video, audio, images and text.
“My experience over the past year has shown me just how important it is to integrate technology into university classes,” Hagler said at the Bass Digital Education Fellows spring showcase. “This means that private tech companies will continue to play a part in digital education, making it necessary for us to train and retrain as instructors become proficient with the best digital tools.”
You can view a short demonstration of VoiceThread by Hagler that shows how VoiceThread is used across the disciplines at Duke. The flexibility of the tool offers instructors multiple options for communicating in synchronous and asynchronous courses:
You can hear Hagler speak more about his work by watching his presentation for the Bass Digital Education Fellowship Spring Showcase below:
Learn More
You can read more about the general Bass Digital Education program experience, including the professional development opportunities offered to fellows.
If you are interested in learning more about participating in the Bass Digital Education Fellows program, subscribe to our newsletter to receive an alert when applications open for the next fellowship cohort. Applications for the 2020-2021 session are closed, but we provide more information for the 2022-2023 academic year in Fall 2021. Applications are submitted through the Graduate School. To see a full list of eligibility criteria and required application materials, visit the Graduate School site.