Introduction

Many SoTL projects begin with a problem (Bass, 1999, 2020). After teaching an interdisciplinary, graduate-level course on scholarly digital storytelling for more than a decade, however, I instead had many questions. In this course, I witnessed high student engagement with both content and technology as students developed digital, research, and communication skills. They were proud of their digital stories and shared them professionally and personally, reaching beyond the classroom and traditional academic silos (Schrum et al., 2022). Something positive was also happening for me as an instructor. Every time I taught the course, I expanded my own digital, academic, creative, and pedagogical skills, finding myself challenged—in the best possible ways—to engage deeply with student projects and solve unanticipated problems. Students talked about the experience of finding their voice and reimagining their approach to learning. One reflected, “It’s not really about getting that A or A+. It’s really about making mistakes and being fearlessly creative.” What fostered this enthusiasm and passion for learning? What led to a willingness to embrace new forms of communication and engagement? I wanted to understand what was happening as well as how and why. I also wanted to know if similar things were happening in other classrooms that incorporated scholarly digital storytelling across disciplines, institutions, and even continents.

To begin this work, I started with a definition. The phrase “digital storytelling” was often used to describe personal or community stories (Jamissen et al., 2017). I crafted the phrase “scholarly digital storytelling” to differentiate what my students were doing as they experimented with new forms of academic communication, blending research with storytelling to share their work across media and to reach new audiences (Schrum, 2021). In my graduate course at a large, public, research-intensive institution in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, students individually created 10-minute digital stories or a non-linear equivalent based on their discipline, academic interests, digital skills, and professional goals. A history student, for example, explored the historical treatment of Filipinos in the Navy while a higher education student researched the experiences of first-generation college students in leadership positions. Topics vary widely, from gender equity in higher education and cross-cultural learning through international branch campuses, women’s suffrage, and student parents. Several students have experimented with interactive digital storytelling, including rhetorical structures in open-world games and a Cuban Missile Crisis simulation.

I began to formulate a series of SoTL questions:

• What were students learning?
• What skills did they use after completing this course?
• Would scholarly digital storytelling work across contexts?
• How did faculty at other institutions teach scholarly digital storytelling?
• How did they get started?
• What challenges did they encounter and how did they revise their pedagogical strategies in response?

I also contemplated challenges I might face in conducting this research, including the difficulty of studying something that combined digital skills, content knowledge, and disciplinary thinking. What were effective strategies for assessing student work, for example, across a range of digital skills? With these questions in mind, I embarked on a multi-year SoTL project using an interpretive, qualitative research approach (Chick, 2018; Miller-Young, 2025) to explore teaching and learning with scholarly digital storytelling from both faculty and student perspectives. The journey allowed me to investigate digital literacy across disciplines and continents and to further develop and refine my methodological approach. It also challenged me in unexpected ways, leaving me even more aware of the need for further research on student learning with educational technology.

Existing Literature

SoTL focuses on teaching and learning, but this is not always true of educational technology research. Castañeda and Selwyn (2018) write that “it is striking how little is known about the relationships between technology use and learning” (2). As discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this volume, SoTL research on educational technology can bridge that gap. Research on digital storytelling has expanded in the years since I began this work. There are now studies from multiple disciplines and teaching contexts (Snelson, 2018). Instructors have documented student engagement with disciplinary learning (Fletcher & Cambre, 2009), intrinsic motivation (Fung, 2017; Gachago et al., 2015; Seraphin et al., 2019), and deeper understanding of content (Schrum, et. al., 2021; Singh, 2014). There is also evidence of faculty resistance or ambivalence (Yi et al., 2020), due in part to concerns over their own technical skills (Belcher, 2017). This theme reappears throughout the literature and Wooley et al. (2021), among others, discussed the need for instructors to “become not just digitally literate (knowing how to use the tools), but also digitally fluent (using the tools in pedagogically authentic ways)” (p. 227). My research also draws from work on digital literacy in higher education (López-Meneses et al., 2020; Oliver & Jorre de St Jorre, 2018). Several recent scoping reviews have used terms such as “video production in content-area pedagogy” (Snelson, 2018), “educational digital storytelling” (Wu & Chen, 2020), and “multimodal composing” (Jiang et al., 2022), although these were not yet common when I started this research. SoTL provides an important lens for this work in a way that emphasizes pedagogically effective integration of technology and meaningful student learning (Felten & Chick, 2018; Manarin et al., 2021; Sweeney et al., 2017).

Researching Student and Faculty Voices

A sabbatical in 2018 provided the opportunity to investigate these questions systematically, a core component of SoTL work (Boyer, 1990; Chick, 2018; Felten 2013). I submitted an institutional review board (IRB) application to my university and, after receiving approval, began reaching out to former students who had taken the course between 2010 and 2018. I conducted 32 individual, semi-structured interviews, reaching roughly half of those who had taken my scholarly digital storytelling class to that point. Interviews ranged from 45 to 60 minutes. I also collected their course work, with permission, including blog posts, project updates, final reflections, and scholarly digital stories, as artifacts of student learning. Interview questions focused on student learning during and after the course, including expectations, experiences creating a scholarly digital story, development of disciplinary understanding and digital skills, advice for future students, and applications beyond the class. I often opened the interview by asking students to describe the digital story they had created and why they took the course, starting with the concrete while offering opportunities for interviewees to share their purpose, goals, process, and reflections looking back on the experience. I asked how their topic or project changed along the way, how the experience compared to learning and assessments in other classes, and whether or not they shared their digital products beyond the classroom.

I then sought out faculty nationally and internationally, across disciplines and teaching contexts, who taught what I defined as scholarly digital storytelling. I wanted to know what they experienced as instructors and what their students experienced as learners. Using purposeful sampling (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), I identified potential interviewees in three ways: publications or presentations discussing teaching experiences, conference or workshop attendance related to scholarly digital storytelling, and faculty networks, including colleagues mentioned during faculty interviews. I conducted 25 individual, semi-structured, 45- to 60-minute interviews with faculty who had taught some version of scholarly digital storytelling and 12 of their students. Interviewees represented 20 institutions, 15 disciplines (including education, biology, history, digital arts, medicine, foreign language, and anthropology), six countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, Norway, United Kingdom, and United States), and a range of types of institutions (e.g., community college, liberal arts, research intensive) and faculty positions (e.g., contingent, term, tenure track, tenured). Many of the faculty interviewed primarily taught undergraduate students, while a few taught graduate students exclusively.

Interview questions focused on faculty goals and experiences teaching with scholarly digital storytelling as well as observations of student learning. I purposefully asked about processes as well as outcomes and challenges and requested syllabi along with examples of successful and less successful final projects:

• Why did they incorporate scholarly digital storytelling into their courses?
• How did they structure the assignments?
• How did their students engage with content, knowledge production, and audience?
• How did faculty assess student learning in a digitally rich environment?

At this point, I had a lot of data—close to 70 interviews as well as sample student course work—and a new question about where to begin the data analysis. I am a historian who teaches in a higher education program in a college of humanities and social sciences. Historical research involves close reading, analysis, and interpretation, and I came to SoTL through digital humanities and a focus on teaching and learning with technology. I am also an interdisciplinary scholar in SoTL where disciplinary methodologies are both encouraged and debated (Chick, 2014; Halpern, 2023). Throughout this research, I drew on these many experiences and methodological perspectives to centre student learning while valuing content knowledge acquisition, digital skill development, and process.

I recorded all interviews (video and audio), so I began with generating transcriptions using Temi, an AI-powered voice-to-text tool. I checked and verified the transcripts and sent them to interviewees for member checking. I coded and analysed all interviews using inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Braun et al., 2019) in DeDoose, a subscription-based web application designed for qualitative and mixed methods research. I followed initial phases of familiarization and code generation with theme development and review (Braun & Clarke, 2006). During this iterative process, I developed additional themes and reviewed the data multiple times for referential adequacy (Nowell et al., 2017). A graduate research assistant reviewed the data independently, and we compared codes and themes. Codes focused on key topics, including academic research, faculty and student experiences, advice for faculty and students, audience, authentic learning, challenges, collaboration, student engagement, scaffolding, and transferable skills.

At the same time, I began reviewing collected course work, primarily from my own students. I coded and analysed written work in DeDoose following a similar process, but the digital work, including multiple iterations of student digital stories, required a different approach (Hafner & Ho, 2020; Jiang et al., 2022; Oskoz & Elola, 2020). I watched and rewatched the stories at different points in their development (e.g., rough cut to final version), looking at content, story, and digital skills. I drew upon my experience in history and digital humanities, including close reading and multimodal thinking, and sought strategies for analysing digitally born work in an effort to identify shifts in student thinking and learning (Lodge et al., 2018). I also examined syllabi and sample scholarly digital stories created by faculty.

The volume and variety of data allowed me to explore teaching and learning with scholarly digital storytelling from multiple angles. Applying an interpretive qualitative research approach (Chick, 2018; Miller-Young, 2025), I gave myself time to explore data from faculty and students organically, including digital stories, and to examine course structures and processes. I reflected on my own experiences and those of my students. In a project focused on digital scholarly communication, I also considered my desire to share this work publicly both within SoTL communities—through journals such as Teaching & Learning Inquiry and the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—and more broadly across disciplinary spaces, such as Arts and Humanities in Higher Education and Higher Education Research and Development. This helped me shape my writing and think strategically about ongoing pedagogical conversations where this work might contribute, including those cent red on authentic learning, digital literacy, and multimodal communication (Bedenlier et al., 2020; Literat et al., 2018; Morgan et al., 2022).

One article, for example, drew on data from my own courses and focused on cultivating digital skills in the humanities (Schrum, 2022). Results indicated that with careful scaffolding, formative feedback, and student support, scholarly digital storytelling can increase digital agency, problem-solving skills, and knowledge production among graduate students. Another article examined the development of academic and digital research skills, including autonomy, flexible thinking, and multimodal communication, through technology-enhanced assessments (Schrum & Bogdewiecz, 2022). I collaborated with colleagues in Norway and the United Kingdom to explore the potential for scholarly digital storytelling to engage students in authentic learning (Schrum et al., 2021) as well as the impact of audience on student learning, motivation, and skill development (Schrum et al., 2022). I then looked deeply at the experiences of faculty across disciplines and teaching contexts, through interviews and course materials, examining instructor motivations and challenges along with student outcomes (Schrum, 2023). Finally, I created an open educational resource (OER), Scholarly Digital Storytelling, to share my teaching materials, research on scholarly digital storytelling, and sample student stories (Figure 7.1).

I relied heavily on student interviews and student work, including scholarly digital stories, when writing about student learning. I then focused on interviews with faculty and analysis of their pedagogical choices, including course design and revisions when teaching with scholarly digital storytelling. While the process of collecting and analysing multiple forms of data from so many different angles provided valuable insight and perspective, it resulted in a significant amount of content. Some of these sources were easier to analyse than others and, given limitations of time and space, I learned to prioritize depending on the intended audience and publication. I found value in looking at similar forms of data, such as student or faculty interviews, to address some questions. In other cases, looking across the data was most productive, such as reading a student’s interview and then examining their course work throughout the semester, from an initial project pitch to a final digital story and student reflection. This process required careful consideration each time I prepared to discuss the research and findings, but it also allowed me to explore the interconnectedness between pedagogy, digital skills, disciplinary content, and student learning across disciplines, geographic locations, and teaching contexts.

Lessons Learned

I learned many lessons along the way, and there are several things I would do differently if I were starting this project today. I took advantage of a sabbatical to begin research on my own teaching and, at the same time, began interviewing other faculty and their students. Given more time, it could have been useful to separate these processes by starting with my institution, reflecting on what I learned, and building on that as I branched out. Beyond interviewing faculty, I would have enjoyed the opportunity to observe them teaching with scholarly digital storytelling in their own classrooms, virtually or in-person, and to have colleagues observe and provide feedback on my teaching. There would also have been value in bringing groups of faculty or students together to discuss their experiences with scholarly digital storytelling and its impact on their pedagogy or learning. I would have liked to interview more students at other institutions about their experiences, including watching student videos with the interviewees to capture their responses in real time. I have seen how valuable this is in my own classes when students watch their rough cuts with classmates and we screen the final works together. As a creator, you see your own work differently when you watch it with an audience and many students and faculty have described similar experiences.

I developed separate interview protocols for faculty and students which allowed me to focus on their different perspectives and experiences with scholarly digital storytelling. The protocols, available on my website, worked well for this research, and I did not revise the questions as I continued through the process. One forward-looking question was especially productive. I asked students what advice they would have for future students encountering scholarly digital storytelling for the first time, and this prompted many interviewees to pause, reflect, and share thoughtful insights about their experiences before reframing them as concrete suggestions. I similarly asked faculty what advice they would have for future students and for other faculty, and both prompts produced meaningful reflection and ideas for what they might change in their own classrooms. Finally, I closed by asking a question I learned from one of my scholarly digital storytelling students: “What didn’t I ask?” This has become my favourite interview question and one that I integrate into every research project because it opens up conversations about things I do not know to ask.

Conclusions

Teaching and conducting research on scholarly digital storytelling allowed me to bring together several discrete parts of my academic and professional life, including SoTL, digital pedagogy, and scholarly communication. The research grew in interesting directions, and this book chapter offered a welcome opportunity to reflect on the process and lessons learned. It offered a chance to explore the ways in which SoTL must adapt to the increasingly digital world of higher education by examining the complex blend of technology, pedagogy, and student learning in the post-pandemic classroom. Demand for graduates with digital skills and competencies will continue to grow, and higher education can play a central role in meeting that need by infusing technology-enhanced learning. Research on SoTL and technology can provide a window into best practices for integrating technology-enhanced learning in organic, meaningful, and productive ways and modeling how we can learn from each other across disciplinary and pedagogical contexts.

Going forward, I hope to see this field expand and encourage others to conduct SoTL research related to educational technology in higher education. There are still many approaches to explore. These include finding creative ways to frame research on technology and learning, thinking broadly, asking big and small questions about teaching and learning within digital spaces, and looking for new ideas and collaborations in unexpected places. Be fearlessly creative and we will collectively improve teaching and learning with technology in higher education!

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Media Attributions

All images in this chapter have been created by the author, unless otherwise noted below.