Jisc Student Experience Experts Group Meeting

On 20th April I went down to Birmingham for the Jisc Student Experience Experts Group Meeting.

This was a meeting of the student experience experts group (formerly the learning and teaching experts group), and was an opportunity for practitioners to support the work of Jisc in enhancing the digital student experience, and engage in discussions around current and future plans.

Here is a summary of what I got from the event:

• Heard about Jisc’s current and future plans through their digital futures ‘Visions’
• Further understanding how digital capabilities can be applied in our institutions
• Learned about new ways of engaging staff in curriculum design and delivery
• Heard about new diagnostic/self-assessment tools and explored new guides for scaling up online learning and assessment and feedback
• Shared and learned from best practice examples presented by other members of the group

Using visions to meet future challenges in further and higher education

Jisc have, in consultation with the sector, been looking into the future to develop visions that represent higher education in 2020 & 2030.

These visions can be viewed in full on their website: Using visions to meet future challenges in further and higher education, and here are the slides from the presentation on the day:

Building digital capability

Next we had an update on the Jisc Building Digital Capability work, and of particular interest was the development of the ‘Discovery’ tool, a diagnostic/self-assessment tool for staff, which then provides a profile and personalised CPD content:

Innovation in blended delivery – new ways of engaging staff in rethinking their curriculum design and delivery

Next, Deb Millar talked about ‘Innovation in Blended Delivery’, including her work on LearningWheel, a model of digital pedagogy:

 

Delivering online learning: are you ready?

The highlight of the day for me was the presentation by Heather Price, Senior Co-Design Manager at Jisc, on their work around ‘Scaling Up Online Learning‘.

Their project aims to identify the barriers to universities in expanding their online course offering, and find solutions to reduce them, and their ‘Scaling Up Online Learning Guide‘ provides tools, techniques, strategies and activities to support the development and provision of online learning programmes.

The Guide has already been invaluable in getting us to think about some of the questions we need to consider in relation to online learning, and soon they’ll be releasing an Online Learning Readiness Tool – a diagnostic tool which will help users identify their personal readiness for creating, delivering or supporting online learning, and provide links to useful resources and guides based on the results.

Transforming assessment and feedback with technology

Finally from Jisc was an update on the Electronic Management of Assessment (EMA) project, exploring how technology can support the assessment lifecycle, from the electronic submission of assignments to marking and feedback.

Again their EMA Guide has been really useful for us in shaping our thinking around assessment and feedback, particularly in relation to technology enhanced learning, and soon they’ll be releasing their EMA self-assessment tool:

Using a digital capabilities framework for CPD and community building

The day finished with a series of member showcase presentations, and of particular interest was Richard Francis and Mark Childs from Oxford Brookes, talking about using a digital capabilities matrix for staff CPD.

Their approach is based on the Jisc/NUS Benchmarking tool, which aimed to improve the student digital experience in universities and, when used in this way, is intended to get staff thinking about TEL from student perspective:

Some of you may have seen me tweeting from the event using the #jiscexperts16 hashtag, but in case you missed it, here is the Storify from the event:

 

If you have any questions or comments then please leave them below…

Phil