Teaching essential graduate attributes via digital cultural heritage: An assessment model

Teaching essential graduate attributes has always been a challenge to educators because these “soft skills” are hard to be taught inside classroom. While many innovative initiatives seek an outside-in perspective, very few of them look at how to further develop students’ learning experience from understanding the central, enduring, and distinctive features of their own school and/or university. Stemming from the first digital heritage project among communication schools in Greater China, this exploratory study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of using such an inside-out approach to enhance the impact on learning, as well as cognitive and emotional changes of current students toward attaining essential graduate attributes in the communication profession. In the first year of this two-year project, we selected students in six classes to participate (N = 183) in an online survey and received 97 completed responses from four selected classes (N = 127). Regression analysis showed that students’ personal involvement and evaluations of the interview sharing and teaching methods were all positively correlated with self-perceived learning outcomes. Results also predicted that self-perceived learning outcomes was positively associated with cognitive and affective changes. Qualitative feedback from students, course instructors, and alumni also demonstrated the effectiveness of this inside-out approach.