Engaging Students: Digital Storytelling in Information Systems Learning

One of the general challenges in today's teaching and learning environment is identifying ways to create meaningful and engaging learning experiences that go beyond a traditional lecture. The discovery-learning paradigm has a potential to address this challenge by encouraging students to be active participants in their learning experience. In this paper, we report on our exploratory study of the use of digital storytelling to support discovery learning in an introductory information system (IS) course. Digital storytelling, in contrast to the traditional lecture format, encourages students to use computer-aided mixed media such as audio, video and images to construct and convey knowledge around a topic in the form of a story. The aim of the digital storytelling project was to encourage students to take ownership in their learning process by giving them the opportunity to design, create and present their own class materials. We discuss our findings on how digital storytelling facilitates learning of complex IS concepts. The results suggest that a careful pedagogical design around story planning, digital story production and reflection are important to achieve positive learning experience of students.