 Now, and I'd like to thank Barry Edmonds for giving up his time today. Barry's from Nottingham, University of Nottingham. He's worked there for a number of years, and this was through a recommendation of our last chair of Elsig, who worked quite closely on her PG Sir with Barry. Maybe you'll talk about some of that, Barry. I'd like to hand over to Barry and we'll have... Do you think about 20 minutes or 30 minutes of view, Barry? I think probably about 30 minutes. OK. And then, so, store up your questions, stick them in the chat area, and let's settle in. Barry, please feel free to take it away. Thank you. OK. Yeah, hello. Welcome. Thank you for joining me today. So my name is Barry Edmonds from the University of Nottingham. The work we're going to talk about today came about in actually my previous post. I started a new job yesterday, but up until then, I was the programme lead for the university's student digital capabilities projects. And today, we're going to consider some of the data and the sort of strategic thinking that have been needed to develop that body of work to support the student digital capabilities of our undergraduates. What do I mean by digital capability? Well, in our context, we're largely talking about the GISC framework for digital capability, which comes about from their building digital capabilities service, which is a subscription service. And their framework can be compartmentalised in many different ways. Here, I've broken it down into 15 distinct statements, distinct areas of digital capabilities that might be digital wellbeing. So looking at your sort of health, your safety, relationships, work-life balance, or it might be data literacy, the capacity to create and manage access using digital data. So that gives us an idea about what I mean by digital capability. Although as we'll see throughout the presentation, that slightly changes in our instance. So today, I'm talking about a sort of broad spectrum of things that have happened. And we feel that the success that we've had to date has resulted from the integration of sort of four different types of activity that's allowing us to take forwards a comprehensive programme for students that's adopted across the university. And while addressing the university's strategic priorities, meets the students' needs, but also sustainable over that longer term. So as I'll take you through the presentation, you'll see I've used symbols on most of the slides to indicate what kind of activity was going on. And those can be the strategic alignment. So that's sort of like real buying from the university itself. Stakeholder engagement, where we've gone out to consultation with individuals or schools, for example, data collection and delivery of student-facing resources. And I would suggest that these four strands of activity are really the sort of first key takeaway for this presentation in that all four are needed to make sustainable progress. And I guess the second key message of this presentation is that change requires time. Our story, as you can see on this timeline, begins back in 2018. And in fact, it's still very much a work in progress. And to be fair, even before 2018, there were projects, ideas, individuals that paved the way for our stories to begin. They just fall out the remit of the story that I'm telling you today. So I'm going to start by providing a brief recap of the first stages of that timeline, work that was undertaken by my colleague, August Both Newell, who was my predecessor as the program lead for digital capabilities projects and then was promoted to Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at the University. So you can see in these early days, the timeline indicates a mix of high level university buy-in and stakeholder engagement activities along with some data gathering. And overall, I would say that the success of this first period came from having funded posts to deliver an evidence based approach to educational enhancement. So back in 2018, a number of things happened one being the funding that was available for certain posts. So we were able to fund five faculty level digital learning directors. So a sort of a digital champion of a senior academic within each of the faculties to really promote the digital agenda to share good practice across the faculty and across within a faculty and across faculties. And the second post of funding being for the program lead role, as I say, that was Elizabeth Newell in these early days. And up until yesterday was myself, I've just changed jobs. And I guess another sort of thing that came about was at the same time, careers and employability service. We're working to identify which professional competencies should be articulated through the curricula to increase the employability of our graduates. So those would be, as you see on this slide, professional communication, coordinating with others, self-reflection, but also digital capabilities. So in the autumn of 2018, we subscribed to JISC's services, the two services that impact the Building Digital Capability service and to the Digital Experience Insights service. And in the first instance, we used the Building Digital Capability service and in particular tool that they have, which is a sort of a series of questions called the Digital Discoveritl and it asks about a person's perceived sort of confidence capability in each of those capability areas. And we run that with current students, current of 2018, I should say. And during the process of collecting that data and over the winter, we decided to run a similar survey with some of our alumni. We created a bespoke survey for those, but based on the questions in the Discoveritl. And so we reached out to alumni who graduated in the past five years and asked them essentially what digital capabilities are needed in a workplace and which of these have been developed at university and what support would have prepared them better for the workplace. So we take a look at the data that we collected during this first phase. Of around 1200 students completed the Discoveritl and students, you can say, felt most proficient in capabilities of digital identity management, digital sort of ICT proficiency and digital communication. Plus at the other end, digital capabilities where they help these proficient being digital participation, creation of digital learning activities. Those are activities to support the learning of others and digital research and problem solving. And then you see the spread of scores throughout the rest of the capabilities. Now, with our alumni data, we had three hundred and seventy five alumni respondents that completed our bespoke survey. And we asked them, as I said, what is important to your job? And you can see here the top three capabilities that are identified as being important to their jobs, being ICT proficiency, information literacy and data literacy. Whereas the three things that they thought were least important to their jobs being digital participation, that sort of participating in networks, digital teaching and digital identity management. However, what is striking with this data is not so much which ones they thought were most important to their jobs, but the second set of bars, which is to what extent they thought those skills were developed on their course. I think it's quite striking that we see alumni thought that their degree had not really prepared them that well for the level of capability. Of any of those capabilities there to do their jobs. And now I'm going to see this slide. It really does strike me how low we're hitting on those percentages for developing digital skills, you know, particularly for information literacy, data literacy. You would have thought we'd be developed to a high degree during the normal course of studies. But it's obviously something that's lost along the way there. What we're teaching doesn't really have a workplace alignment. So we took those sets of data and shared it with the schools, faculties around the university, through a random consultation and intended to help academic colleagues determine where they saw or where they saw the gaps in the provision where they could do better. To address that balance. And I guess it would have been easy at this stage to work with small groups of early adopters from those consultations to implement small scale local school-based changes. So the early adopters, I guess, such digital champions. As I said, the plan was to implement changes across curricula, across the whole of the university. And so we took a different route. And what we ended up doing was writing a white paper that led to 16 recommendations being made to the university's teaching and learning committee. Now, this is a high-level committee that reports basically only to the university executive board. So we took a different route to the university board sort of outlining what we thought, what changes we needed to make in the institution to, for say, the development of those capabilities. So that graduates do come out of their degrees feeling better able to do their jobs. And so then we moved things there along the lines of offering Microsoft Office certification to students and developing creative skills with Adobe Creative Cloud or computer programming. And so along with that sort of white paper sort of recommendations of actions that we could take, we also requested that we dedicated teaching and learning subcommittee comprised of staff on students, external stakeholders be established to support us in advocating for student digital capabilities across the institution. And the first task of this steering group was to divide a scoring matrix to help prioritize those recommendations that we've made, which ones are gonna be most cost-effective, easiest to implement, and develop a delivery plan essentially. Okay, so the steering groups established and they're off now looking up those recommendations and how we can best make use of them. Meanwhile, we look at our other subscription with JISC, which is the Digital Experience Insights Survey. This survey is a national survey managed by JISC that can be conducted with teaching staff, professional services staff, postgraduate researchers and obviously undergraduates. Each institution gets their own report but can also benchmark themselves against other institutions that buy into the service. The survey addresses some ways and attitudes to work in digitally and the support for riders rather than what digital skills and individual holds. And we can see here, we completed this in spring 2020. In fact, we completed it right before we went into lockdown. So it almost provided a sort of a useful benchmark for ways of working online before everyone was forced to work online. So it's sort of a nice benchmark. This is how everyone was feeling pre-pandemic at the university. I'll come back to this later on in the presentation. So we move on to delivering change. In summer 2020, we now look at starting to deliver resources to help our students. So we've learned many lessons since March 2020 about supporting students who've experienced business as usual at the university, coming into lectures on campus and then having to transition to lockdown learning. But we knew that we had a whole cohort of learners coming in a new session that were going to be anxious about starting a degree that was largely online and we needed to meet their needs. So rather than focus on digital capabilities at this point, we decided that we just needed to create a resource that welcomed new students and explored the ideas of learning online. And so we created a micro website covering the basics of what we felt all new students would need, like what teaching would look like that year, so it might be blended, it might be all online, how to join teams meetings, sort of a warm handshake at the beginning, sort of say this is what digital means and how you're likely to experience it in that first semester because we didn't know at the time how long we were going to be in that situation. That went down really well with the new starters, got 30,000 views, but it was really sort of a stop-gap measure intervention before we returned to our digital capabilities work. Meanwhile, the steering group for digital capabilities has been working through those recommendations and I've come up with a delivery plan. The delivery plan sets out three work strings, three working groups of individuals that would work towards providing digital capability to our undergraduates and those three working groups were the digital students that aimed at first year students, the digital researcher, which is midterm students, aimed at sort of the skills and competencies that you will need to deliver, for example, a successful research project. And finally, the digital graduate which is really looking at the employability of our undergraduates, so focusing on sort of mid to final year students. Actually, as we work through the year, we realise we don't need that digital researcher working group as a separate entity and they sort of get brought into the digital students and we look at now at sort of two working groups, focusing really on the first couple of years of undergraduates, a study called the digital students and then finally the digital graduates will pass up expanding their horizons of our undergraduates. So the digital students, we can move there fast forward to autumn 2021 and the digital student working group have been working all year to produce a Moodle module available to all students initially at new students, sort of taking the place of the Student Guide to Digital Learning Micro-Site, but now with a suite of resources and competency statements that they could work through to self-assess and reflect on their digital proficiency. We've got buy-in from faculties and schools, hold dedicated sessions during induction weeks to promote these resources. So if we think back to those capabilities I mentioned earlier, there were very much statements in a broad sense and you can see that capability sort of language being used here on the sort of the bold quote at the top of the page. And then we moved towards having what we call digital competencies, with competencies being a sort of a yes-no statement. So very, very precise so I can send and receive messages using university email. And we set the module up so that students could tick each of the competencies that they felt they were good at and those that they couldn't tick there were resources available by little interactive learning packages that they could go and learn as they format an email for example and then come back and tick the appropriate competency to say that now they feel confident that they can do it. So that's the way the digital student got to last autumn and they're now working on delivering resources for the rest of that first year and second year experience for students with the view to making new resources live at the start of this new session in September. Because we now have more than those in capability statements we have lots of competencies we decided to represent our competencies as a sort of tube maps showing how different capabilities or competencies interplay with one another so a real nice visual representation for students and that sort of echoed throughout the Moodle side so they really appreciated that. The digital graduate meanwhile I say were focused on employability so in this instance digital student is very much sort of activities that you could undertake to support your learning in your curriculum with the idea being that students could go there of their own free will and do the resources or an academic might point them to those resources when a particular skill is needed whereas the digital graduate were focused on sort of extracurricular opportunities for learning and development that expand the students thinking beyond that of their normal curriculum so our plan is to offer interventions to undergraduates some in the mid stage to sort of final year that remedy weaknesses that our alumni have identified particularly thinking sort of like non-stem subjects here might benefit from you taste the sessions on the artificial intelligence or programming and coding how big data can inform decision making in a business workplace and then picking up on one of the weaknesses which is around digital learning activities or digital teaching which is where you sort of create resources to help others learn we set up a set of resources for peer mentoring which actually is piloted already and is live and I guess one of the challenges that we are going to face with the digital graduate is that it's extracurricular it seems to be something you do on top of your degree is that there's likely to be very low uptake on those resources and so we won't meet our target of helping our students become more employable but fortunately the university has an excellent mechanism already in place called the Nottingham Advantage Award which is led by the career service whereby students can reflect on their extracurricular activities and be evidenced to gain 30 credits towards their university transcripts and we're going to use this approach to promote our digital graduate offering to students so we'll set up a Moodle site with resources that students can engage in with no requirement that they do so but with the option to then complete some form of assessment through reflective writing for example presentation that will then give them the extra credits to their transcripts and we're hoping that this approach will really open the doors to the digital graduate work package resources to a wider array of students final part of the presentation now of entitled feeding back and looking forward feeding back and looking forward well earlier I mentioned that we ran the digital experience insight survey on the eve of the pandemic in 2020 we also ran it in spring of 2021 so mid-pandemic and so I'm just going to address what we did with the data that we collected there because I'm not touched on that yet I guess some context is required here in summer 2021 the university published a educational student experience strategic delivery plan which is I guess it should be fairly self-explanatory activities work packages that the university needs to take to ensure that we're delivering the highest quality education as part of this plan they listed key pieces of work that were going to be priorities for the university over the next two to three years this list comprised of 25 distinct work packages so how to improve welcome and induction weeks engagement with the student voice how to make the best of our states and infrastructure so in considering how to make recommendations based on digital experience insights data which as I said earlier is about attitudes to working digitally the support that we provide people to work digitally this digital experience insight provides a real key insight into how these work packages might go ahead and we undertook a mapping process of the data that we received from insights including sort of quantitative data or open text comments and aligned them to the 25 work packages and we're actually able to map across 18 of those work packages and I'll just give you a few examples of how that data could have some impact so the first example is our work package which is looking at the business case and procurement processes for video and lecture capture systems so this work package in the ASA Action Plan will determine what services we offer going forward and which providers we choose to select so when asked in the insight survey experiences of lectures our students reported that they made use of recorded lectures to a significantly greater extent than the rest of the sector and this is one of the key benefits of the insights data is that you can benchmark yourself against other HEIs or Russell Group Universities for example so this data then enables us to ask a whole host of questions so what accounts for this uptake in usage compared to the rest of the sector was it that we responded quicker in providing recorded lectures was it the way that we transitioned to online learning was it down to the existing infrastructure that made adoption of recorded lectures possible was it the choice of our service provider that enabled these things and these are questions that the work package leads for the ESC Action Plan will need to address and having this data on hand will help them make their decisions and help them to ask questions like those that I've just posed I will skip over this next one I'll do this one so as to reflect on sort of positive aspects of teaching online in the survey SAF and students so in the ESC Action Plan the teaching, learning professional development work package because it's on initiatives to raise the quality of our teaching and during the last two years all staff had to adapt their teaching styles quickly adopt new skills and technologies into their repertoire excuse me and as we saw earlier sorry excuse me as we saw earlier our students make greater use of recorded lectures but actually most of those recordings that our students viewed were of live online lectures so a recording of today's session for example so what did our staff think of delivering those online sessions and recording them well our Insight States cleaning case that while some enjoyed this experience of teaching this way and benefitted from the training that we gave them some had less well and require further assistance so having this kind of data available to us from the survey allows us to present professional development team for example with such data so that they can identify the best ways to reach out to those staff to ensure that students get the best learning experience should they just be delivering live sessions and recording them and making them available or should they be pre-recorded lessons these are questions for that work package needs to consider so we wrote individual reports for each of the work package needs dating that we aligned data to and set them the task of telling or responding with how they're going to respond to this data with their own work package and that we've managed to secure that there are proper governance structures reporting back to ESC the Education Student Experience Board that they will respond to this so not only we've collected the data we've shared the data we've ensured that then there are governance structures in place that they will now have to respond to the data that we've shared with them so that our data can have impact forward meanwhile time moves on again and in March 2022 we delivered the insight survey data again sorry the insight survey is again in March so can we call this post-pandemic probably not getting there we are returning to almost the university it'll be interesting to see whether the attitudes have changed over the course of this last year but that is a discussion for a future meeting so this is the digital learning journey that we've gone through so far at the University of Nottingham as I said our aim was to deliver a set of digital capability program of resources that will be applied across the university and hopefully embedded in curriculum we are still a long way from doing that I've touched on some of the resources that were produced so for the digital students and the digital graduate work packages and actually where we're at with those is that they are discrete pieces of work that students can go to and have a look at in their own time with no pressure although we are advocating that faculties and schools promote that and embed it in their curriculum as much as possible so if you go from working with individuals on small scale changes that was one approach we could have taken we've adopted this strategy of creating a universal resource that everyone can access and then asking schools to pick that up and embed it where they can the ultimate aim though is that over the next two to three years we get enough momentum behind these resources and packages that actually the resources that we've created wholesale just get moved into curriculum or point it at least embedded from our central website into individual modules at the university but we're still a long way away from that there are as I say small pockets of early adopters that are embracing our approach for example here we've got a colleague Jezz Turner in engineering as a professional competencies module as part of his engineering degree and is directly referring back to our digital student resources and awarding students with credit for reflecting on that process we have students doing research projects in the final year reviewing our digital student module getting feedback from other pharmacy students for example about the importance of digital capabilities the importance of the digital student module so we are slowly starting to make waves across the university so that the central resource does become more visible within schools and faculties and finally so another sort of example of how we start that way this sort of spreading we've got placement students now using our resources to reflect on the learning that they've undertaken whilst on their year-long work placements and directly relating that back to the competencies that we have on our digital student module I will leave it there thank you very much everybody I'm sure we can go back and look at individual slides or questions as they arise in the follow-up questions