I recently completed a ‘Digital Leaders Programme’ with Jisc (below), along with my colleague. We had expected to gain more insight into the the Jisc digital capabilities framework in order to use it as a guide to building a strategic planning framework that maps Jisc digital capabilities for academic and admin staff with regard to identified needs, existing resources, and supported tools in our university. However, this specific approach was not discussed in detail during the training, but we gained insight into strategic and operational approaches to enabling organisations to adapt to and benefit from digital technologies, and learned from models and examples of how to lead and influence change in digital learning within our university.
I have also attended trainings on project management and influencing people, and will be trying to use the insights from this training to assist staff with developing more blended and hybrid learning solutions. Specifically, I hope to put in motion a plan to ensure that all new staff who join the university carry out a self-assessment of digital capabilities, and are assigned a learning technology mentor whose role is to support them as they integrated into the university’s teaching and learning environment.
The Jisc Discovery tool is a self-assessment tool that can be used by staff to gain insight into areas of digital competencies where they may need more support. The report that is produces can be customised to include links to resources that we provide, and we are enthusiastic about using this in the College, and have been communicating with the relevant persons in the university central administration who are also looking into it. This is taking longer than we expected, but we will continue advocating for it and it is an opportunity to learn more about the challenges involved in rolling out such an approach.
Despite the many advances made because of the lockdowns, the expansion in the use of Moodle and other learning technology tools seems to have plateaued, and there are still possibilities for building staff capability. The training model, where you ‘build workshops and they will come’, has distinct limitations. I have prepared and delivered many workshops, but they are often poorly attended because they may not fit into educators’ schedules, a lack of motivation and/or top-down directions, and limitations due to the ‘one size fits all’ approach that is inherent to the workshop training approach. It is also difficult to know how much impact they have in terms of actually changing practice.
Each educator has a unique panoply of digital skills, teaching style, time availability, disciplinary requirements, and motivation. If resources were not an issue, the best approach would be to provide personalised coaching for all academic and relevant administrative staff.
However, given limited resources, I intend to propose to the College that there could be a scheme whereby all new staff complete a Jisc Discovery self-assessment exercise on arrival. The tool would include links and recommendations on how to self-improve, and in addition each staff member gets allocated a Learning Technologist who will review their self-assessment with them, and identify priority areas to target. As a stretch goal, it would be good that the probation period includes a review of digital capabilities, and opportunities to plan for more training, however that would probably require more negotiations and work with HR and other departments.
I will continue to work on improving digital accessibility and expanding the resources available for all staff to make this as easy as possible. In the first instance, after completing the work on FYCD, I will produce videos and documents that demonstrate clearly the differences that proper formatting, tagging, etc, make to a person who needs to use screen readers to access documents.