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Digital education

JISC Connect More 2017

17 July 2017
Dewi Parry

Dewi Parry

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by Karl Luke

Last month, I attended the JISC Connect More 2017 event in Bristol and was particularly interested in two specific programmes showcased.

Preparing staff and students to be digitally ready

Christine Percival, Digital Fluency Manager from Lancaster University gave the opening keynote. Christine introduced Lancaster’s digital strategy and their Digital Fluency Framework.

Christine discussed how they have sought to use digital fluency as an enabler to achieve their digital vision. This involved establishing a digital strategy advisory group, a digital fluency steering group and re-modelling their Information Systems Services (ISS) to provide staff and students with training to increase their digital capabilities and confidence. Related initiatives Lancaster have established include:

I think the work done at Lancaster is worth reading and evaluating in light of the work currently being carried out at Cardiff.  The Jisc Case Study can be read at: http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6639/1/DigicapLancasterUniversity.pdf

Data-driven decision making

The JISC analytics lab was introduced in a session and participants were offered the opportunity to explore Heidi Plus for data visualisation. I was interested in exploring if this platform could be of benefit to the education portfolio programmes and for teaching and learning more generally.

I spoke with Sarah Davies (Head of Higher Education and Student Experience at Jisc) who mentioned that other institutions were looking at how best to capture and analyse data from virtual learning environments and associated learning technology tools. As I understand it, the analytics lab functions by offering a day-a-week secondment from an institution to Jisc (for a short and defined period) to work in partnership in developing the data programme: http://bit.ly/jisc_analytics_lab_interest