One of my roles at Oxford Brookes University has been to come up with a Technology-Enhanced Learning programme. It’s laid out in the university’s TEL framework – under the line

Redesign and implement a staff developmental programme for TEL based on the Brookes Attribute of Digital and Information Literacy.

The structure for this programme is just about to go live, so this is a useful point to reflect on why it looks the way it does, and what the aims of it are.

Goal # 1 – put the student experience first

Staff developmental programmes usually look at what skill sets staff need to develop. The approach suggested to me (by George Roberts – my line manager and also a Principal Lecturer for the Student Experience at Brookes) was to start with the Jisc / NUS Student Digital Experience Benchmarking tool, which you can see at this link. The tool breaks down students’ experiences into 12 principles, and each principle is further subdivided into around 20 different attributes, on a scale from first steps, to developing, to developed, to outstanding. It’s quite comprehensive, and has a good provenance, (supported by Jisc, the NUS and collated by Helen Beetham). Furthermore it reframes the whole debate about TEL from the perspective of “what should a student get out of it” rather than “what do we need to put into it?”

Fortuitously, a colleague at Brookes, Richard Francis, who is the Digital Services and Learning Technology Manager, had already developed an online site based on the Jisc / NUS tool. This site replicates all 12 principles as separate wepages and for each cell of the matrix on the page there is a link to a further page which can be populated with resources. Richard had even begun populating the site with resources through a series of workshops with a group of people Brookes calls DMELDs, or Digital Media and e-Learning Developers.

The two images below show what this looks like:

As resources are added, each cell is ticked, which means that users can see quickly where the resources are. Clicking on text in a cell links to a page such as this:

Looking for a name for this website tool, we toyed with Digital Capabilities matrix, and Digital Capacity matrix, also Digital Competencies matrix. Unable to choose, we just went for DC matrix. However, as we went out to talk to more people about it, we (quite reasonably) met resistance to the idea of yet another abbreviation. So we went for Digital Choices matrix, as that seemed to actually describe what it did, rather than what it was for.

The idea is then that a member of staff who wants to make a change to their students’ learning experience, goes through the DC matrix, looks for where they need to develop their practice, and by clicking on the link are not only provided with a list of resources, there is also a link to a forum of people who are also engaged in that area. Ideally once they’ve completed the intervention, they can upload the results and so provide resources for people who come after.

The site could also be used as a personal audit tool. A staff member looks through the matrices, decides where they are at, and looks to the cell to the right to identify where next to develop their practice.

The next step in the development continues in the following post.