Digital Literacy in a Globally Connected World

Course Description

EME2620 is a digital literacy course for students in any discipline — and it is worth saying at the outset what it is not. It is not a course in how to use particular software.

Florida's statewide description sets the framing: "digital technologies have become an influential part of our everyday life. For this reason, digital technology skills have become central across disciplines and are valued as an essential career competency. In this course, students learn how to access, evaluate, apply, participate, and interact within the educational and professional digital environments as they solve complex problems within a technology-rich world."

Those five verbs are the course. Access is finding information and knowing where to look. Evaluate is judging whether a source deserves belief — the hardest and most valuable of the five. Apply is using tools to solve a real problem rather than to complete an exercise. Participate and interact are about conduct: collaboration, professional communication, digital identity and the consequences of what you publish.

⚠ The course exists because the assumption that students arrive already digitally literate turned out to be wrong. Students who have used technology since childhood are frequently fluent with consumer applications and genuinely weak at the things that matter professionally — evaluating a source, managing files and versions, understanding what a spreadsheet can do, collaborating on a shared document without destroying it, writing an email that a stranger will act on, and recognising that a search result is an advertisement. Familiarity is not literacy, and the gap is what this course addresses.

Two Florida public institutions carry this number: Florida Atlantic University and the University of West Florida, both at three credits — and ⚠ one of them counts it toward general education while the other does not. See Special Information.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Access information efficiently — search strategy, library and specialist databases, and knowing which source type answers which kind of question.
• ⚠ Evaluate digital information critically: authority, evidence, currency, purpose and funding; and recognise misinformation, manipulated media and algorithmic filtering.
• Apply productivity and collaboration tools to solve a substantive problem — documents, spreadsheets, presentations and shared workspaces.
• Participate appropriately in digital environments — professional communication, netiquette, collaboration norms and constructive online conduct.
• Interact with digital systems as a competent user: file and version management, cloud storage, account and password hygiene.
• Apply information ethics — attribution and citation, copyright, fair use, plagiarism and academic integrity.
• Apply digital privacy and security practice — what data is collected, how it is used, and how to reduce exposure.
• Manage a professional digital identity, understanding that what is published is durable and searchable.
• Communicate effectively through digital media, choosing a medium appropriate to an audience and purpose.
• Solve a complex, open-ended problem using digital tools, which is what the statewide description asks the course to end in.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply data literacy — reading charts critically, recognising misleading visualisation, and basic spreadsheet analysis.
• Examine the global dimension the statewide title names — the digital divide, access inequality, and cross-cultural communication online.
• Apply accessibility principles to digital content.
• Produce digital media — basic image, audio or video creation.
• Examine generative AI tools, their uses and their limits.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Digital literacy frameworks — what the term means and why familiarity is not competence.
• Information search and retrieval — search strategy, databases, and the difference between a library database and a web search.
• Source evaluation — authority, evidence, bias, funding and currency; lateral reading as a method.
• Misinformation and manipulated media — how false information spreads, and how algorithmic curation shapes what you see.
• Productivity tools — word processing beyond the basics, spreadsheets as a reasoning tool, presentation design.
• Collaboration — shared documents, version control, and working with others without overwriting them.
• File, data and account management — organisation, naming, backup, cloud storage and password practice.
• Information ethics — copyright, fair use, Creative Commons, attribution, plagiarism.
• Privacy and security — data collection, tracking, phishing, and practical protective measures.
• Digital identity and professional communication — the durable public record and how to manage it.

Optional Topics

• Data literacy and critical reading of charts and statistics.
• The digital divide, global access inequality and cross-cultural online communication.
• Accessibility and universal design for digital content.
• Digital media production — image, audio, video.
• Generative AI: capabilities, limits and appropriate use.
• Emerging technologies and their social implications.

Resources & Tools

• Open educational resources are common in this course — many programmes use freely available digital literacy materials rather than a purchased textbook. ⚠ Check before buying anything.
• Productivity and collaboration suites — Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, both normally supplied free by the institution.
• Your institution's library databases and subject librarians. ⚠ These are a substantial paid resource you already have access to, and most students never use them.
• Source-evaluation method resources — the Stanford History Education Group's work on lateral reading and civic online reasoning is the best-evidenced material in this area and is freely available.
• Fact-checking organisations — Snopes, PolitiFact (which is Florida-based, at the Poynter Institute in St Petersburg), and the International Fact-Checking Network.
• Creative Commons for licensing and attribution; the U.S. Copyright Office for fair use.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar resources on privacy and surveillance.
• Accessibility guidance — WCAG and your institution's accessibility office.

Career Pathways

⚠ This is a general-education style course rather than a professional one, so it does not lead to a particular job — it supports every job. That is the honest framing, and it is also the course's actual argument.

• Every professional field. The statewide description calls digital technology skills "an essential career competency", and employers consistently report the gap: graduates who cannot manage a spreadsheet, write a clear professional email, evaluate a source or collaborate on a shared document.
• Roles where these skills are the job, should the subject interest you: instructional designer and training and development specialist (SOC 13-1151), technical writer (SOC 27-3042), information and records management, digital communications and library and information science (SOC 25-4022).
• ⚠ The natural continuation at UWF is the Instructional Design and Technology programme, which this course sits inside the department of — EME3351, EME3624, EME4674 and the rest. Note that is a design and training profession, not teacher education; a student wanting to teach in K-12 schools needs a different path.
• Florida context: Florida's largest employers — hospitality and theme parks, healthcare systems, the Orlando simulation and training cluster, aerospace and defence — all run substantial corporate training operations, which is where instructional design careers in this state predominantly sit.

Special Information

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	⚠ General-education designation
Florida Atlantic University (SUS)	Digital Literacy	3	⚠ Social Sciences
University of West Florida (SUS)	Digital Literacy in a Globally Connected World	3	⚠ none recorded

Both carriers award three credits. UWF uses the full statewide title; FAU shortens it. ⚠ The titles are not the interesting difference — the designation is.

The 45 contact hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit lecture course. UWF places the course in the School of Education, Department of Instructional Design and Technology.

⚠⚠ It counts toward general education at FAU and not at UWF — check your own institution

Florida's course record shows FAU recording a general-education designation in the social sciences for this course, and UWF recording none.

⚠⚠ This is the institution-specific designation rule in its clearest form. General-education category placement is decided by the institution, not by the course number — so the same course, at the same credit value, with the same statewide description, fills a general-education requirement at one Florida university and is an elective at another.

What to do about it. Check your own institution's general-education list before relying on this course to fill a requirement, and if you are transferring, check the receiving institution's list too. ⚠ A course can transfer as credit without carrying the category designation you expected — Florida's common general-education core gives substantial protection to A.A. completers, but a mid-degree transfer has less.

⚠ The course carries no Gordon Rule designation at either institution — it is neither writing-intensive nor mathematics for that purpose.

⚠ No prerequisite, and deliberately so

Florida's record states the prerequisite as "none", and neither carrier lists one. The course is designed to be open to students in any discipline at any stage.

⚠ The 2000-level number is worth reading correctly. It signals a lower-division course, not a remedial one. The audience is every student, not students who are behind — and the strongest argument for taking it early is that the source-evaluation and collaboration skills make every subsequent course easier.

⚠ Marked available for dual enrolment — with elective credit

Florida's record marks this course available for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit. ⚠ Note that the dual-enrolment marking is close to universal across the EME prefix (401 of 409 records carry it), so it says little that is distinctive; and elective credit is not a subject credit. A dual-enrolled student should confirm with a counsellor how their district's articulation agreement treats it.

Transfer

A lower-division course, so credit moves between Florida public institutions transparently. Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course.

⚠⚠ The general-education designation is the thing to verify, not the credit — see above. Keep your syllabus.

AI Integration

⚠⚠⚠ Of every course in this repository, this is the one where generative AI is most squarely part of the subject matter rather than a consideration about studying. A digital literacy course that did not address it would be failing at its own stated purpose.

The statewide description asks students to access, evaluate, apply, participate and interact in digital environments. ⚠ Generative AI has changed what each of those five verbs requires, and in the same direction:

• Access. A model answers instantly and without sources. That is a genuine improvement in speed and a genuine loss of provenance — you receive a claim without the means to check it, which is the opposite of what a citation does.
• ⚠⚠ Evaluate. This is where everything concentrates. Every surface cue people were taught to use for credibility — fluent prose, confident tone, correct formatting, plausible detail, cited-looking references — can now be produced at no cost by something with no knowledge of whether any of it is true. The cues have been decoupled from the underlying quality.
• Apply. These tools genuinely help with drafting, summarising and explaining — and they fail in ways that require you to already know something to detect.
• Participate and interact. Synthetic text, images, audio and video are cheap. The question "is there a person behind this" is now a real one to ask about a review, a profile, a message or a video.

⚠⚠ The method the evidence actually supports is worth learning properly, because it is not the one most people use. Research on how professional fact-checkers work found they do not evaluate a source by reading it carefully and judging how it looks — they leave it immediately and see what other sources say about it. That is lateral reading, and it works against AI-generated content for the same reason it works against a polished propaganda site: it does not depend on surface cues at all. If a claim matters, check it somewhere independent.

Two practical rules this course should leave you with.

⚠ First, verify every specific claim — and treat citations as claims. Language models produce references that look correct and sometimes do not exist, or exist and say something different. A citation you have not checked is not evidence, and in academic work an invented one is the most detectable error you can make.

⚠ Second, know your institution's academic integrity policy and the expectations of each individual course. They differ, legitimately — some assignments are designed around these tools, others exist to build a skill that using them would bypass. Ask rather than assume, and understand the distinction: an assignment testing whether you can write an argument is not served by generating one.

The broader point is the one the course is built on. Digital literacy was never about knowing how to operate tools; it was about judgement — where information comes from, whether it deserves belief, and what you are responsible for when you pass it on. ⚠ Generative AI has not made that judgement less necessary. It has removed most of the shortcuts people used to avoid exercising it.