With the groundwork done of turning the Jisc / NUS benchmarking tool into a structured website of resources, and incorporating a CPD element, the next step was to ensure the DC matrix met the following criterion.

Goal # 3 ensure that the programme meets users’ needs

The DC matrix had already been used with DMELDs, but getting an idea of whether this was actually the approach that other people would find useful is obviously something to address as soon as possible. Between us, George Roberts, Richard Francis and I showed it to a range of people for feedback. These included:

• academic staff at Brookes
• librarians at Brookes
• the other academic and staff developers within OCSLD
• the wider community through the Jisc Students Experience Experts Group meetings

We had a mixture of responses. The first of which is that looking at the staff capabilities from the perspective of student experiences wasn’t helpful, in that usually staff started with the process of engaging with technology-enhanced learning from the perspective of identifying a technology that could help, and then needing help with that specific tool. I’d found too that when I had an example of good practice to share via the site, that my tendency was to think (for example) “where would webinars go?” rather than think about the student experience it was providing. The search function helps here, in that you can just search for the relevant element, but it’s not really in the spirit of reframing TEL from the student perspective. That shift in perspective will take time, I think. In the meantime, this suggested we needed alternative routes to the resources.

The second response was that there is a lot in the DC matrix as a whole. This is unavoidable as there are so many aspects to the student digital experience and we didn’t want to deliberately avoid looking at some aspect. Suggestions were to highlight some principles, or to produce filtered views depending on who was looking.

The third response was that there are other models, and other repositories of resources, and this is just competing with them. For example, there is the TEL framework at Brookes, the Brookes graduate attributes, and this proliferation of models is confusing. Also – what’s the point of having a structured access to resources if no-one ever populates the structure?

The response from the wider community  addressed some of these issues, however. The creation of a site based on the Jisc / NUS benchmarking tool meant that it was shareable across all institutions, rather than tied to one TEL strategy. There was considerable resistance to the idea of changing the DC matrix away from the original structure of the benchmarking tool, therefore. However, this addressed the problem of how to populate it; if everyone uses it, then the resources should soon be populated. The problem of it appearing too large was acknowledged, but we got the advice to develop walkthroughs for the principles that might be more commonly used. Finally, what people really liked was how the site also incorporated advice on how to also use any TEL intervention for CPD. The “one cell from the top and one from anywhere else” model for staff development seemed to go down very well. Although probably better coming from Rachel Riley.