Digital Master Plan: Creating Human Connection in Digital Spaces
The first Digital Master Plan asked how FHSU could make online and hybrid learning consistent and high quality. The Second Edition asks a harder question: how do students stay connected — to each other, to their faculty, to the university — when so much of learning happens through a screen? Developed by an 18-member working group of faculty and staff, it sets five recommendations that put human connection at the center of our digital decisions.
Five Recommendations
- Course-level data practice and data governance
Online instructors can't read the room — but the data our courses already generate is a window into it, showing who has gone quiet or fallen behind, with a governed boundary that keeps what's in a course serving the teaching rather than the evaluation of it. - Pathways and community
Two ways in: short, on-demand sessions through TILT when you need a quick answer, and a year-long Community of Practice with tracks in Course-level Data, Regular and Substantive Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and Academic Leadership for those who want to go further with colleagues. - Course design for human connection
One small change to a course can shift whether students feel seen, and a growing library of exemplary modules offers places to start rather than templates to follow. - AI literacy competency
There is room here to experiment with AI, to set limits on it, or to examine it closely and decide against it — each a form of literacy, none a prerequisite for the others. - Program digital identity
What a student moves through from first course to last — the tools, the expectations, the people they come to recognize — takes shape on its own in a physical program, and has to be deliberately designed in a digital one.
The Principles Behind the Plan
The seven themes that shaped the plan converge on a single claim: the conditions that make learning relational are the same conditions that make it transformative.
- Ethic of care and human connection — Designing for belonging, and for students' capacity to think and judge for themselves.
- Communication, transparency, and shared governance — Learning data belongs first to the faculty and students who generate it.
- Faculty growth and capacity — Professional development is an infrastructure question — time, recognition, peer learning — not a programming one.
- Institutional infrastructure for sustained innovation — Innovation lasts when the institution builds for it: recognized workload, coordinated platforms, and roles that outlive the people currently holding them.
- Technology and data literacy in service of connection — Technology, and the data it generates, are windows into the learning experience.
- Program-level identity as the lever of change — Change happens where faculty already work together: in the program.
- Students as partners in their own learning — Care and connection are what the institution provides; agency is what students develop through it.
Get Involved
The plan is work to join, not a document to read. The Digital Master Plan Community of Practice brings faculty together around data, human connection, AI literacy, and academic leadership. Teaching Innovation and Learning Technologies (TILT) can tell you what's currently running and how to take part.