JISC

The University of Reading has a culture of ‘digital adoption’ at its core, with an eagerness from senior managers and decision-making groups to be in the vanguard of innovative working practices and technologies to help drive the University – staff and students - forward.

One of the University’s corporate objectives 2009-2013 is to further improve the employment prospects of its graduates, and to ensure ALL of our students have the opportunity to experience work-based and placement opportunities whilst at the University. Supplying the digital skills to enable this is core to this project.

Across the University there are many examples of good practice in the area of digital literacies. However, there is no joined-up thinking and approaches are patchy. This project represents an exciting opportunity to document and replicate good practice and digital heuristics from one place to another while capturing the psychometric, psychosocial and psychodigital enablers of this.

The project will provide resources for all members (staff and students) of the University to help to understand how best to implement skills to harness these and other technologies for their current role, but also as an individual living, learning and working in a digital society.

The project aims to develop a cross-institutional strategy for recognising and enhancing the digital literacies for all members of the University of Reading. This will be grounded in good practices that exist across the University and beyond; along with the needs of stakeholders within the University community and amongst the wider community, including employers. Having developed a strategy we will implement change management approaches aimed primarily at employability (‘Digitally Ready for Placement’).

It is intended that these actions be user-centric in design to address the barriers to entry for users, capturing best practice from around the University and developing these into dissemination activities, for instance ‘digitally ready’ workshops. It will also include the engagement of two ‘student ambassadors’ who will act as the conduit between the project team and student body. Promoting the project and ensuring the student voice is fed back into the development of the activities.

Objectives

Our project will develop a holistic and inclusive approach towards achieving our vision to create a Digitally Ready community within the University. We will draw upon our history of successful JISC projects and general e-learning project delivery and will harness our expertise, resources and evidence base in order to:

• Baseline our digital competence, needs and desires using JISC audit tools;
• Develop a strategy for the University of Reading to ensure all members of the University have the digital literacies for their current role and have access to resources to ensure they are Digitally Ready for their future and to better support the University’s aims and objectives;
• Develop change management processes to ensure realisation of the strategy;
• Begin implementation of the strategy;
• Document our methods so that they can be applied to other institutions and lead to further areas of study.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• Up to 10 pilot project case studies which capture a range of users and departments
• New and refined workshops to implement the outcomes of the pilot initiatives
• ‘Digitally ready’ - a web interface documenting this project and linking to other resources such as digipedia.com
• A number of guidance notes and best practice case studies around engaging, working with and delivering to a range of users across a HE/FE environment.  It is in intended that these add to and not duplicate the library of work already developed by JISC.
• Increase in staff from traditionally digitally excluded areas i.e. gardeners and other auxiliary staff registering on digital literacy workshops and lifelong learning training
• Post project survey to assess changes in baseline for user self-assessment in digital capabilities, knowledge and skills.
• “Digitally ready” recommendations to adopt into future University corporate plans
• Mind-set changes by senior managers and decision makers to promote digital literacies throughout their spheres of influence
• Students understanding and adopting digital presence to increase their employability – this should also lead to an increase in number of students into work