JISC

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Learning Literacies for the Digital Age was a research study aiming to find out what literacies learners require and what UK HE and FE institutions are doing to support them. The study informs JISC and the wider UK FE and HE communities by providing a better understanding of learning literacies, how they are evolving, how requirements are changing, and how they may be supported in different contexts.

Executive Summary

The project set out to:

• review the evidence of change in the contexts of learning, including the nature of work, knowledge, social life and citizenship, communications media and other technologies
• review current responses to these challenges from the further and higher education sectors, in terms of: the kinds of capabilities valued, taught for and assessed (especially as revealed through competence frameworks); the ways in which capabilities are supported ('provision'); the value placed on staff and student 'literacies of the digital'
• collect original data concerning current practice in literacies provision in UK FE and HE, including 15 institutional audits and over 40 examples of forward thinking practice
• offer conclusions and recommendations, in terms of the same issues reviewed in point 2

Review of evidence

Key messages from the background review include the following:

1. Learners can, under the right conditions, become more critical, evaluative, self-aware, self-confident, skilled and capable in the use of technologies
2. Learners can also, under the right conditions, develop a wider and more effective range of strategies for their own learning
3. Although some of these capabilities may be 'generic', the consensus is that they are best supported in 'communities of practice', 'communities of inquiry', or 'learning groups' focused on tasks of value and interest to the learner
4. Skills acquired iteratively, through practice within authentic tasks and as needed are better retained than those taught one-off, in isolation, and through instruction

Understanding literacies as situated practice means, in developing learners:

• providing authentic contexts for practice, including digitally-mediated contexts
• individual scaffolding and support
• making explicit community practices of meaning-making
• anticipating and helping learners manage conflict between different practice contexts
• recognising and helping learners integrate their prior conceptions and practices

Key messages

Key messages from the review of future learning scenarios are that educational institutions must adapt to help students deal with:

• economic uncertainty
• high competition for employment in the global knowledge economy
• increased levels of alternative, contract-based and self-employment
• the rise of interdiscipinarity and multi-disciplinary teams focused on specific tasks
• a networked society and communities
• multi-cultural working and living environments
• blurring boundaries of real and virtual, public and private, work and leisure
• increasingly ubiquitous and embedded digital technologies
• increasing ubiquity, availability and reusability of digital knowledge assets
• distribution of cognitive work into (human and non-human) networks of expertise
• rapid social and techno-social change

Capabilities which are likely to be required across a range of future scenarios include:

1. Manage work/life balance, particularly as technologies erode the boundaries between work, leisure and learning, between home, school and workplace
2. Social entrepreneurlaism – the capacity to understand how social systems work, innovate within systems, and adopt roles flexibly and strategically
3. Develop and project identities, manage reputation (cf Owens et al 2007)
4. Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA project)
5. Communicate and collaborate across national and cultural boundaries, using a variety of technologies and media
6. Contribute to knowledge and understanding in hybrid networks of people and non-human cognitive agents
7. Manage career path, learning path and professional development
8. Exercise judgement and expertise, bring knowledge to bear
9. Act safely, ethically and responsibly in environments where public and private are being redefined
10. Reflect, plan, seek support, learn from situations and from others
11. Assess and address threats to health and to the environment
12. Exercise multiple modes of meaning making (cf Kress 2003, SeelyBrown 2005, Siemens 2004 and 2006)

Recent studies

Recent studies of digital and learning literacy provision suggest the following challenges and pinch points:

• Learners' information literacies are relatively weak but learners have little awareness of the problem
• There is poor support for learners' developing strategies to make effective use of technologies for learning, and in some institutions there are still barriers to use of personal technologies and social networks
• Learners require intensive support in migrating to more ICT-based study practices, particularly at transition points such as course selection, induction, final year preparation, move to post-graduate study
• Many learners lack general critical and research skills: 'digital scholarship' is poorly communicated and modelled in many subject contexts
• Learners' different approaches, attitudes and experiences of technology represent a new form of diversity which institutions must address to ensure equity of access
• Most learners use only basic functionality and are reluctant to explore the capabilities of technology
• Most learners are still strongly led by tutors and course practices: tutor skills and confidence with technology are therefore critical to learners' development
• There is a potential clash of academic/internet knowledge cultures, emerging particularly around issues of plagiarism, assessment, and originality in student writing
• Students are often dissatisfied with the feedback and assessment process, and it is rarely used as an opportunity to further the development of self-awareness and literacies of learning
• There is often insufficient opportunity and motivation for learners to integrate literacies in authentic tasks
• Tutors are still insufficiently competent and confident with digital technologies for learning, despite evidence that learners are strongly influenced by their example
• Institutions need to respond to external agendas such as European harmonisation, the demand for higher skills, and demographic shifts in the learning population

Summary of the LliDA 'Framework of Frameworks'

For analysing the components of digital and learning literacy (or capabilities leading to effective learning for a digital age)

Selected findings from the research studies

Due to a lack of clear ownership at institutional level, learning and digital literacies are rarely the basis of an integrated institutional strategy. Effective integration can be provided where the Learning and Teaching Strategy addresses learning in the digital age directly, prioritises innovation in programme design, and establishes clear lines of action/responsibility to other strategies such as ICT, Quality, Employability, e-Learning, Learning Resources and devolved faculty/department and service-level strategies. An institutional literacies champion should be capable of initiating action in both the digital and the academic/learning development area of institutional provision, and of working across the curriculum teams/central services boundary.

Institutions have to prepare themselves, and not just their learners, for an uncertain future. Among the paradigm-breaking scenarios considered in this study, an increase in contract-based and self-employment giving rise to a loss of confidence in formal qualifications is perhaps the one that should give institutions most cause for concern. Institutions must position themselves to respond quickly and flexibly to the need for new kinds of capability, and to recognise and represent graduate capabilities in new ways.

Our study found consistent good practice in central provision for the three areas of academic/learning literacy, information literacy, and ICT skills. Staff in these areas have their own well established cultures, frameworks and forums for sharing professional practice. In many cases these cultures include a focus on learners as individuals, with their own preferred approaches and particular needs. A systemic problem is that staff working in these areas are still operating in relative isolation from one another, and – in many cases – from staff in academic departments too. Support is most effectively integrated where there is an institution-wide policy of assessing and progressing learners' skills. In FE this is usually delivered around guidance tutorials, while in HE the availability of an e-portfolio system can be the catalyst and focus of provision. ,However, even these good examples are not sufficiently far-reaching. In addition, students' digital and learning literacies need to be assessed and supported as they engage in academic tasks, and they need to be equipped with the habits – including reflection and peergroup support – that will allow them to improve their learning strategies throughout life.

Employability is often the stated rationale for an integrated approach. However, careers staff were difficult to reach in our study, and although 'employability' extends beyond careers, we draw a tentative connection between the lack of engagement with the 'literacies' agenda by careers staff and a tendency for 'employability' itself to be poorly articulated and supported. There is a need for further work to extend perceptions of employability beyond conventional careers services to include approaches to learning, programme design and engagement with employers.

Librarians have a long tradition of supporting literacies and working with academic departments. One problem, though, is that where librarians have championed the digital aspects of information literacy, this is regarded as having 'solved' the problem of the digital in learning. Our study found very little central support for media literacy, including critical aspects of reading different media and creative practices of media production. There was also very little mention of communicating and sharing ideas either as an aspect of information literacy or in its own right. Effective learners require both of these, and other digital capabilities such as navigating virtual and immersive worlds, managing digital identities and reputation, and using digital technologies for reflecting, planning and making sense of their learning experiences. While librarians can be regarded as pioneers in articulating the impact of digital technologies on their area of expertise, and adapting their practices of support, digital literacies cannot be left to librarians if they are to be embedded throughout the institution.

There is great diversity in the literacies mandated for consideration during the curriculum design and validation process. We identified three modes of integrating literacies:

1. Institution-wide programme (usually portfolio-based) with generic processes of review and reflection, but the specific skills practised and assessed in subject modules
2. Skills modules or module components, delivered alongside 'subject' teaching, typically by central services staff: may include tailored (subject-specific) tasks or examples
3. Literacy provision fully integrated into modules and/or programmes of study, including learning outcomes and assessment: typically in professional/vocational programmes that are already competence-based (but in one case via the tutorial system).

The great majority of our examples across all modes came from vocational and professional courses, and there is plenty of evidence that these are the subjects spearheading support for literacies in the curriculum.

Much excellent practice in disciplines was not visible to our study methods. Many literacies are so deeply and tacitly embedded in subject teaching that academic staff do not identify their practice as literacy-based at all. Examples might be visual literacies in art, or critical media literacies in media studies. Recognising that different subjects can contribute expertise in different literacies for learning is a first step towards finding and sharing good practice.

Social software is now widely being used to enable peer mentoring and group support, for example around skills workshops, during induction and first-semester studies, on placement, and for group work. Study buddy and student mentor initiatives rarely address digital literacies directly, but could be adapted to do so: student help-desks are common for supporting proficiency with digital devices and networks. All of these approaches are being tried by central service staff with good evidence of success.

Inevitably much peer support takes place under the academic radar, but academic staff can help by being explicit about what kinds of collaboration are appropriate, establishing peer review processes, and setting group assignments. Our findings confirmed and expanded upon the challenges identified in the literature review:

• institutional silos, so learners often have several places to seek help with their learning, and cultural differences can make cross-service/dept collaboration difficult
• (often) poor embedding of literacies into the curriculum, particularly at the level of feedback and assessment
• (often) poor integration of information/digital literacies with academic/learning literacies
• curriculum provision tends to be one-off and cohort-based, rather than based on an ethos of personal development: central provision is more personal and developmental but rarely reaches learners when they are actually engaged in authentic tasks
• Academic staff perceive students as being more digitally capable than is really the case
• poor self-evaluation by learners, particularly in relation to their information skills, so voluntary services are not reaching those in most need, and skills modules are not perceived as relevant or important

Student expectations, student diversity and employability were the main agendas driving change in provision for learning and digital literacy

Conclusions and recommendations

In supporting digital and learning literacies, support staff and curriculum teams should:

• Design flexible learning opportunities
• Situate those learning opportunities, where possible and appropriate, in authentic contexts (workplace, community, placement)
• Design learning opportunities for highly interconnected individuals, operating in distributed networks of expertise
• Continually review how technologies are integrated into curriculum tasks
• Continually review learners' techno-social practices and the practices of professional and scholarly communities (anticipating that these will be different and that helping learners negotiate the differences will become part of the pedagogic agenda)
• Support learners to use their own technologies and to develop effective strategies for learning with technology
• Use assessment and feedback to encourage innovation in learners' approaches to study, rewarding exploration as a process: current assessment regimes often reward conservatism
• Support learners' developing self-efficacy and self-direction in learning, empowering them to navigate increasingly complex learning landscapes
• Support learners' personal reflection, progression and planning, for example by engaging with e-portfolios and learning records

In changing cultures of learning to place greater value on 'literacies of the digital', institutions should:

• engage and motivate students to develop learning literacies by:
• monitoring, supporting and assessing digital competences across the learning experience
• articulating the educational benefits and importance of digital literacies
• recognising and rewarding the expertise that digitally proficient students can offer to others in the learning community
• using rich learner-related data to support portfolio-building, personalised advice and guidance, and where appropriate personal curricula and learning environments
• enabling learners to record a wide range of achievements and to present rich accounts of their learning history to different audiences
• engage staff in rethinking their practice by:
• realigning reward structures around innovation in learning and teaching
• supporting flexibility, stakeholder-responsiveness, and innovation in curriculum design
• making learning development an explicit concern of teaching staff
• fostering digital scholarship and digital professionalism, linked to changes in teaching practice
• engage employers and other stakeholders:
• in meaningful dialogue, recognising that the stated needs of graduate employers are only one perspective on employability in a rapidly-changing social and economic landscape
• in continuous review of the purposes and outcomes of the curriculum

Those who have worked in and reflected on this area, including our reviewed authors and participating auditors/contributors, are clear that literacies cannot be bolted onto existing programmes of study. Literacies emerge through authentic, well-designed tasks in meaningful contexts. If UK HE and FE is to reposition its offering around 21st century graduate skills, it will need to invest heavily in the three areas currently prioritised by the JISC e-learning programme: flexible curriculum design processes: innovative curriculum delivery and support that exploits digital technologies wherever appropriate; and management of knowledge resources in an environment where educational content is openly available to all.

Report available electronically only

1. There is a tension between recognising an 'entitlement' to basic digital literacy, and recognising technology practice as diverse and constitutive of personal identity, including identity in different peer, subject and workplace communities, and individual styles of participation.