Developing Digital Literacies
programme
What is expected?
Helen Beetham
October 2012

What is expected from DDL?
• Who is expecting?
• Challenges and priorities
• Developments in DL
• What are we really offering?
• The asks and offers process
2

Who is expecting?
• We are here in a representative capacity
• Institutions - why did they support your bid?
what’s in it for them? how does your project
support institutional priorities?
• Staff in the sector - through the Associations
and the different staff involved in Projects -
what do they expect? what do they need?
• Students in the sector
• JISC and other sectoral bodies

Institutional challenges
• Attract enough of ‘the right’ students: e.g.
AAB, non-restricted, ‘new markets’, regional
• Retain students by meeting their needs/
expectations
• Progress students to achieve graduate
attributes/employment
• Build capacity from existing resources
(including restructure/new roles)
• Generate long-term partnerships
• ...

Institutional challenges
What is your institution asking for?

Systemic challenges
• Demonstrate value (to individuals and
society) including value for money
• Remain globally competitive as new
providers gain market share
• Update offer (‘relevant’) while remaining
distinctive (‘traditional’ ‘academic’)
• Deal with multiplying uncertainties
• Student as consumer - new contract,
challenges for development?
• ...

Systemic challenges

Sector challenges
What can we offer ‘UK HE’?

Challenges for people
in the system
• Staff
– insecurity, restructuring, job losses
– need to ‘future proof’ role and career but...
– less time/space/reward to innovate?
• Students
– power/choice depends on grades
– developing identity / career path in uncertainty
– less time/space/inclination to innovate?
– debt = study+work (for most)
– relevance of digital skills to life goals?
• What are the challenges of developing people
in this context?

Personal challenges
What do your stakeholders really
want from this programme?

Developments in DL
• Our six themes:
academic practice | professional practice
assessing/progressing DLs | bring your own skills
student pioneers | digitally literate leaders
• International convergence:
EU Digital Competence project, digitalliteracy/gov,
Digital Champion (MLF), etc
• More awareness
DL as ‘embedded in everything we do’
• ... more cynicism?
‘nothing special’, ‘happening anyway’ ‘kids are alright’
• More enhancement (RoI?), less WP?

What are we really offering?
• Conceptual frameworks - understand DLs / your DL
setting
• Competence frameworks (for staff and students) -
map what you’re doing already and fill the gaps
• Staff development resources - try these
• Student development resources - try these
• Case studies, examples - this is what ‘doing DL
development well’ looks like
• Themes, findings and lessons learned - this is how
it was for us
• Models and methods for embedding digital literacies
institutionally - recommendations and alternatives

What are we really offering?
Design studio pages

The asks and offers process
• Refine your asks now and keep them handy
institutions | people | sector
• Projects: assign 1 person to making the offers
and 1 to asking - you can swap halfway
• Associations: focus on asks for your members
• Askers: visit as many stalls as you can, and fill
in feedback slips for each item you review
• Offerers: collate your slips - and use them to
refine your offer later
• We will reconvene to discuss: what we’ve asked
for, what we’re offering, what the gaps are
14

Developing Digital Literacies
programme
Interim report guidelines
Helen Beetham & Jay Dempster
October 2012

Some general philosophies/
goals
• Synthesis and evaluation is in itself part of
the change process
• Accountability is a growing area of need for
funded programmes.
• Clarity, relevance of key lessons/messages
not needless complexity
• Inspire & inform - illustrate & animate your
findings, link to outputs
• Offer useful, meaningful, actionable

Gathering, analysing, reporting
outcomes
collating & evidencing making sense of & verifying
quantitative ‘deliverables’ qualitative ‘lessons’
(accountability >> institutions/ (knowledge transfer >> programme/
partners/funders) funders, the HE sector)
gathering feedback on project processes, practices and outcomes
across the Programme
(developmental >> programme team/funders)

Writing the report narrative
• 1. Be interesting – this is not just a day job, unexpected, exciting or aggravating
things happen, communicate the ‘human’ element, use examples, avoid waffle/needless
detail, convey the excitement of change rather than just writing to sub-headings.
• 2. Be research-like – investigative as well as pragmatic, micro-theories based on
observations, hunches and conversations as well as on findings and solid evidence.
Record them. This is what makes projects interesting.
• 3. Be communicative – the first audience for reports is the rest of the programme,
use them as critical friends, feedback from them is evidence of what is interesting &
useful.
• 4. Be meaningful – think about what project activities, outcomes and lessons might
mean for people beyond your organisation, the wider sector (graphic above might help).
• 5. Be opportunistic – look for ways of recording what you need to record that don't
take up too much time (iterative reporting, blogging, capturing conversations/outputs,
routine monitoring/usage, turning the best bits into an 'update')
• 6. Be pragmatic – in terms of rigour (reliable, valid data/methods determine the
quality of the evidence produced)
• 7. Be ‘big picture’ esq – related to baseline evidence, seek overarching relevance/
value

Checklist questions - 1
• Is your evidence facilitating discussion or
decision making/action taking?
– What kinds of discussion & feedback is your
project generating and how are you recording/
capturing this?
– How useful is it? (to the work of your project,
institutional change, partners/associations
engagement/contribution, to students, to the
wider sector)
– Is your synthesis of findings and evaluation

Checklist questions - 2
• What kind of outputs are you producing?
– What ways are you providing ‘snapshots’ &
‘sense making’ on processes & outcomes
synthesised across your project?
– Are you tagging topics and key audiences of
findings for later synthesis/dissemination?
– How are you critiquing the data/evidence
you are gathering?

Checklist questions - 3
• Does the evidence add up to something?
– Is it fit-for-purpose and supporting claims you are making
about change and impact?
– Are you communicating outcomes/benefits or defending a
situation or finding in the project?
– How are you filtering/tagging what is valuable and relevant
to your project/strategic objectives and stakeholders as
you go along?
– Are you generating an overall picture of the (emerging)
impact of the work?