 Hwyl fawr! Fawr cymdeithas yma, ydych chi'n eu cyd-fawr i ddweud y cysylltu digital? Mae'r cysylltu yn ffawr i VVOX? Mae'r cysylltu'r cysylltu. Mae'r cyfnod o rai gwybod ymddangos, mae'r fawr i'n gweithio'n gweithio, ond mae'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Felly, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r cyfnod o'i cysylltu i'r morbyl â'r fawr. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r cyfnod o'r fawr i'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'r cyfnod o'r fawr i'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, i ddweud ymarfer oherwydd i FVOX? Mae'r FVOX maen nhw yw'r ddiwrnod o'i fawr i'w gweithio yw y ddigon a gweithio. Mae'r fawr i ddweud yw'r gweithio'n gweithio. ond here, if you'd like to look at the demo and find out more about what VVocs can do for you and your students in your learning and teaching. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to introduce the presenter for today, who is Rob Lowney from DCU, and as I say, this session is what digital competencies do our students need to develop. Over to you, Rob. Thank you very much for the introduction and thanks everybody for tuning in to this presentation today. I'll keep my video off if that's okay to save on bandwidth. So my name is Rob Lowney. I'm a learning technologist at Dublin City University. And I'm here today to present on a little bit of work that myself and my two colleagues, Suzanne, who's another learning technologist and Laura Ann, who is an intern of ours. She just finished her internship last week. And we're going to tell you about some findings we found from a short research study around digital competences of recent graduates and employers with a view to informing how we integrate digital competence development into our curriculum and our assessment at DCU. I'd advise you to follow along with me on the slides. You can access the slides from bit.ly forward slash dcu dash alt C 21. And as I said, I'd encourage you to have a look at those just in case anything happens with my internet today. But hopefully nothing goes awry. So here's what I want to cover in the next 20 or 25 minutes. I'm going to tell you a little bit about a project called EDTL, Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning, which is where this work arose out of. I'm going to tell you a bit about our activities and our focus for the project. Take you through the research methodology, the findings and our next steps. There are some embedded videos in here where my colleague Suzanne has pre-recorded some material. So you don't have to listen to me all the time. That'll give you a little bit of a break. So what is the Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning project? Some of you may have heard this before. This is a project in Ireland involving seven public universities under the auspices of the Irish University Association. It's funded through funding from our national agency, the Higher Education Authority, with the aim of modernising the Irish Higher Education System. This came out of a large strategy report for higher education through to 2030. The aim of the project is to enhance the digital attributes and educational experiences of Irish university students, so making sure students have good digital learning experiences in their university careers and that they're equipped for the world of work and life after university. We aim to do this by addressing the professional development of those who teach and making sure those who teach have good competencies for digital education so they can embed digital in their curriculums. There's a number of policies that interact with the project and intersect with one another and quite a number of these, I suppose, gave rise to the project and sustained the project both at the macro level from European policy, the MISO level at Irish national policy and then locally within my own institution, DCU, there are some policies which support this. So, we can see at EU level the new skills agenda and at Irish national level our national skills strategy talk very much about the importance of our graduates having sufficient digital skills to support and to participate in the ongoing digitisation of our economy and society. Similar, again, our Hunt report here in Ireland which is our long-term strategy for a higher education talks about the need to embed digital education in students' higher education experiences and, again, these intersect with further policies around catering for a digitally enhanced education system and supporting jobs and job development and job growth. Similarly, there is an important need to address staff professional development and to ensure that they have sufficient digital competence for teaching and within DCU we have a promotion framework that recognises that. At European level, we have a competence framework DigComp EDU which the EDTL project uses to align its activities and then centre to all of this intersecting at the centre is our DCU strategic plan and our teaching and learning strategy which embodies and exhibits all three of these different lenses here, the graduate digital skills that are important for the future, the need for students to have a digital education and the need to support staff in developing their own digital competences. Why are we talking about digital competences and digital skills? A lot of us will be aware of the growing discourse around the future jobs and future skills that are needed and then industry 4.0 and so on. A recent report said that we have to make sure that people in the future, when people don't want to say the future, I mean the near future obviously, can add value beyond what is done by automated systems and by artificial intelligence and so on. A lot of what we do now will be automated, will be done by computers and so on. So humans and people, workers, citizens need to operate in a digital environment and to adapt and bring added value to the world of work. In Ireland, the government launched a major initiative two years ago which seeks to, I suppose make Ireland a hub for these future forward technologies to be a hub for disruptive technologies to support business in digitising and upscaling and also to support higher education in making sure that we are educating and preparing our graduates for these very future-focused careers. Obviously COVID is accelerating the digital skills where a lot of us are remote working and still remote working and that requires a level of digital skills and competences and then generally there are all these social issues permeating everything, the digital divide, digital literacy divide, rise of disinformation and fake news and post-truth and all that. It's online safety, cyber security and of course data protection. So it's usually important that we give our students the opportunities to become competent to be able to tackle these issues both during their time in university but more importantly after their time in university. The EU has developed a digital competence framework. I mentioned the Dig Comp EDU framework which is for educators. The Dig Comp framework is for citizens or for workers and it offers them a tool to improve their own digital competence. It gives them I suppose a map of areas in which they should be competent in order to be a successful participant in society. There's five competence areas across eight levels of proficiency from very basic to foundational to highly specialised and the areas are information and data literacy, communication, collaboration, digital content creation, safety and problem solving and within each of those areas of course there's individual competences related to each of those and this is a growing framework. It's quite an important framework and something very useful for citizens and for employers and companies and organisations. The EDTL project at DCU obviously largely is about supporting staff professional development so they can embed digital competence experiences for their students in their curriculum and we use the theme of assessment to do that because you notice assessment is very important to students. It's something they invest a lot of time in so if we align competence development with assessment, we hope that that student will be a greater chance students will engage and will develop those competences. Obviously COVID-19 led to staff overload in terms of professional development. You know, they kind of needed training and PD in order to keep their heads above water and they were kind of less less engaged with the wider vision of enhancing their practice. They were just trying to keep the show on the road. So therefore, we kind of myself, Suzanne and Laura Anne sort of pivoted not to use that terrible word that we associate with COVID. We pivoted our project to focus a bit more on directly supporting students to develop their digital skills. So we did things like creating digital learning resources for them. We ran an informal skills development lunchtime session called Digitown which is kind of fun and students could come in and we'd show and tell some digital tools or some digital tips for studying and we also decided to embark on this small research study about finding out what are the digital competences that our graduates are using in the workplace and that our employers are looking for based on some work that Elizabeth Newell at the University of Nottingham did. You know, we really want, while we know students need to develop competences, we're all in agreement they need to be prepared for the future world of work. We wanted to have concrete information to bring to our academics on which competences do people see as the most important and then work with them to embed it in their assessment and in their curriculum. So the focus on research was recent DCU graduates from 2019 and 2018 and also employers and employer bodies that DCU has a connection with and we wanted to find out the broad non-discipline specific digital skills that graduates are using in work or that employers look for when recruiting graduates for roads. We're aware of course, if you're a computer science student, you're going to be learning digital skills very much, you know, in the arena computer science or if you're a nursing student, you're going to be developing digital skills around using medical technology, et cetera, but we wanted to find broad non-discipline specific digital skills and we used the DigCom framework to align that. Obviously, we wanted to inform our activities with the findings and we were very thankful that we were able to draw the expertise of the careers office in DCU, our placement office and our alumni office and they were their great critical friends to us in this endeavor. We're going to hear from Suzanne now for a moment who will explain the methodology to you. In relation to the research methodology, a few brief notes for you. A mixed methods approach was used. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through an anonymous online survey. We surveyed both recent graduates who had completed programmes over the last three years and we surveyed employers connected to the university as well. Those surveys were disseminated for us very kindly through the careers office and the alumni office respectively. Our survey questions were based around the DigCom framework areas of digital competencies. This framework is a similar framework to the just capabilities framework which is used throughout Europe and in Ireland. The quantitative data was cleaned and analysed using Excel and the analysis of the qualitative data follows the brawn and clark process, the references there on the slide for you and is analysed using Envibo software. Thank you very much Suzanne. So as I said, we reached our surveys in February 2021 to about 9,000 recent graduates and about 600 employers. The response rate was very low, it was quite disappointing. I will say as you can see on screen 62 graduate responses and 28 employer responses. So our sample is very low and that is definitely a limitation of this work, but nonetheless we have found the findings a bit insightful and will still at least help guide our own work, but we are conscious that we can't generalise any of this from such a small sample. Possible reasons for the lack of engagement, it was lack of incentive, we didn't offer any tokens of appreciation or vouchers etc for completing the survey. We didn't issue a follow-up as well, we were conscious that because we were relying on colleagues to distribute the survey, we didn't feel like we could ask them to continue pushing the survey and then also in February 2021 Ireland was in the midst of a very long and deep and dark lockdown and there was a lot of I suppose disengagement across society and a low mood across society. So we suspect people just weren't really interested in completing the surveys. But to just quickly look at some quantitative data and again I won't spend too much time on this, you do have access to the slides and I'd encourage you to take a look at them in your own time. But there was nothing in any of the quantitative data that suggested that the graduates or the employers felt something was very unimportant. You know we are seeing in most cases most of the competencies here on the left most graduates and employers are kind of saying they're very important or they're extremely important. There's very few cases where they're rating them as not very important. So that's good to see and I suppose that aligns with the whole goal of the DIGCOM framework because the framework says that really citizens and workers need to be competent in all of these areas. But area one if you remember was all around information literacy. So again, unsurprisingly graduates saying that that's quite important in their work. Similarly area two is around collaboration and communication. Very important. You can see here all sharing, collaborating, interacting with digital technologies. Less important or not less important, not as important would be things like netiquette and digital identity from the graduates. Area three is around content creation. So again we're seeing you know people saying it's moderately to extremely important creating content, re-using content, understanding copyright and so on. Programming not important or has low importance really from the graduate point of view. Area four is around safety. So unsurprisingly privacy is coming through strong here as something important for graduates in their work. Well-being similarly protecting the environment not rated as important by the graduates which is interesting. Area five is troubleshooting again very much similar to before a lot of graduates saying that these competences are important creatively using technologies and so on. Looking at the employer responses we see a bit more rating of highly important things from the employer. So obviously sourcing and evaluating data, communication collaboration coming through very strongly here from the employers. You know they're really seeing this as very very important for their employees. Same again with area three digital content creation very similar results there to the graduates. Area four we see very very you know unambiguous here from the employer respondents how important privacy, data protection, health and well-being etc. Is an area five which is problem solving. Again we're seeing a lot of these are being rated by the employers as very important. Again I'd encourage you to take a look at that in your own time I'm conscious there's quite a bit there on the slides. So some important things here. On the whole the employer respondents seemed to kind of race the competencies in each area as a little bit more important than the graduates especially in area four around safety which includes data protection etc. And that's possibly because obviously employers there's legislation behind employers to ensure that they adhere to data protection and health and safety at work and environmental responsibilities etc. Both the employers and the graduates roughly expressed the same level of importance around area two which is communication and collaboration. So that's possibly due to COVID obviously we're all working remotely. We have to be using technologies to work and collaborate with colleagues so that possibly explains that. Although interestingly the more employers thought that netiquette and managing digital identity was important and less so with the graduates. So a little bit of a gap there between them. Again area three digital content creation is important except programming. It didn't really say programming was important which is interesting when we hear all this discourse around future jobs and workers and citizens shouldn't understand the basics of coding etc. But we're not really seeing that from our responses. And then similarly the employers felt that basic troubleshooting and the ability to identify the digital skills that you need to develop are more important or they rated them as more important than the graduate respondents did. I'll now hand over to Suzanne again to talk you a bit through some of the qualitative data we got from the service. So I'm going to talk you through some of the themes emerging from our qualitative data and you can read a little bit more of the detail from our in vivo reports on the slides in your own time. But for the moment, I'm just going to give you a flavor of what's coming through in the data. Firstly, we've got the impact of COVID not surprisingly given the timing of our survey. You'll see that our graduates have mentioned it 16 times and two key points are being made throughout those 16 points. The first one relates not surprisingly to the increased dependence on digital skills required around video conferencing tools. But the second point is around the need to have skills to troubleshoot your own IT hardware software in the remote working context. So you'll see the comment. It's the first comment here on this slide and another similar comment on the following slide. From the employer perspective, again, there's recognition that the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting remote working context has had an impact on the digital skills required by employees. So you'll see here two comments, you know, the reliance on digital skills and platforms is very clear here. Okay, and the second theme coming through is an awareness around the importance of digital skills. And this is coming through from both employers and from graduates. You'll see just two references here. It's from employers, but the comments are quite strong, you know, IT's a skill that's needed every day and being able to fully communicate digitally is an absolute must. So very strong language there around the awareness around the need for digital skills in the workplace. And then we thought this is a really interesting comment from one of our graduate respondents. Relating to the kind of the disparity between the generations in relation to digital skills. And I'll just let you read that, take a moment to read that comment on the right. Next, we have emerging from the data some comments around specific tools. And the first one on the strongest specific tool coming through in the data is Excel with 25 mentions by graduates and five mentions by employers. We thought this comment was really telling several of our programmes at DCU have excelled not entire modules but components built into the programmes. But this comment kind of I suppose is very telling The graduate really has just realised that Excel is really useful in the workplace. It's weirdly more common than I thought it would be. So I think it's a really kind of telling comment there. From the employer perspective, then you'll see that employers focus on excellent Excel skills. So excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent. Whereas the graduate responses were really discussing Excel skills from a basic to advanced level. So that there was much more disparity amongst the graduate respondents. Again, in relation to specific tools and software, Microsoft Word is coming up quite a lot in the data. And here you can see an interesting comment from one of our graduate respondents. Yes, mostly people can manage Microsoft Word quite easily but not all of us can use it very well. So again, a recognition of the level of skill required within a particular software package. Next, coming through in the data and a lot of reference to presentations you'll see here 14 references from graduate respondents ranging from financial presentations. A lot of PowerPoint in there creating presentations for upper management. Now, a limitation that we didn't anticipate in relation to this information was the nuance between creating presentations digitally and delivering presentations, which is obviously their very different skills. And in retrospect, we would have liked to design our question to cover that nuance, but it is a limitation of that survey question. Another theme very strongly coming through the data relates to marketing. Interestingly, not only from business or marketing graduates, it's coming across all areas of employment. And you'll see here so that the comments are very brief marketing, marketing skills. They relate then to specific tools that they're using. Content creation is coming across very strongly under marketing. And then I thought this is a really interesting comment from an employer relating to coms and marketing. And this employer is saying that it's something we increasingly do horizontally. Every stock member is involved, not just specific individuals. Social media is very widespread as well. So everyone needs to have a good know-how on how to use content, understand copyrights, et cetera. So you can see here, this is suggesting that marketing digital marketing skills are not so good enough. It's very early yet you have one minute left. So I'm going to talk you through. Yes, I just realized that time myself there. Thanks a million. As I said, please do look at these slides yourselves and the videos are in there. But just very quickly, our next step will obviously be to bring these findings into our workshop so we can help staff design new enhanced assessments that help students develop some of these competencies. Our digital, our digital initiative for students. We can help tailor some of the sessions towards these competencies and we can link in with other services such as the careers office when they're working with students or our student support and development office. They're developing a digital skills course. So some of these important competencies maybe can be a focus in some of those initiatives. So thank you very much for the time keeping there and we'd be delighted to hear from you if you have any questions. So I think very, very quick question that Jim Turner was asking if you could expand more than the idea of programming. Employers want to be a little bit more than students. Yeah, that's definitely interesting, Jim. That was something we found interesting because you know, definitely there's quite a lot of discourse out there about the, you know, and we see it in schools, a lot of kids in school at the moment are doing kind of coding classes and extra coding classes because there is this recognition that it is good for students and for graduates to have some of these skills. I think we are definitely missing a trick and I think in most cases and as you can see between the graduate data findings and the employer data finding employers seem to be not just in programming but in a few other areas as well like data protection seem to be a bit more keenly aware of that importance than our graduates do. So I think definitely we need to in our work in curriculum design and assessment design and so on if we can start bringing these things in a bit more hopefully it'll help kind of plug that gap and graduates and employers will have the same level of appreciation of the importance of these competences and skills. Perfect, and that's my cat come to tell me that the session has ended. So thank you very, very much, Rob. I hope you'll post all of your resources into the Discord channel so that people can find them there and engage with them. Absolutely, we'll do Sarah. Thanks very much. Thank you.