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Digital Literacies at the Institute of Education

 

Project: Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute

Institution: Institute of Education

Programme: Developing Digital Literacies

 

"We have reached the conclusion that digital literacies cannot meaningfully be reduced to skills or attributes, but should instead be regarded as orientations towards engagement with digitally mediated study, focusing on how students cope with complexity, curate the multiplicity of digital texts they encounter, and forge their multiple identities in the process."

 

This is an edited version of the project's institutional story (final report). Please refer to the original for details of all references and additional information. (TO BE ADDED)

 



Summary

 

The development of Digital Literacies is becoming an increasingly urgent priority across the higher education sector. If universities are to harness the potential of new media for education and graduate preparation, they must view the sustainable development of digital literacies as a mainstream priority. However, this is challenging where both staff and students have greatly varying degrees of experience of - and orientations towards - technologies and their associated social practices. As several key Jisc projects have found the most effective means of achieving this is for development work to be specifically-targeted, holistic, contextualised and mapped across programmes at an institution. The SLiDA study also found the introduction of appropriate graduate attributes was an effective means of mainstreaming this development. This is arguably challenging in contexts where mature postgraduate students predominate. The timeframe for study is short, the curricular ‘space’ is severely constrained, and the burden of responsibilities outside university is greater in terms of work and family commitments. At the IOE all these factors prevail.  We also have a proportion of international students for whom taught master programmes present a considerable challenge in terms of literacies and modes of research and scholarship online. The challenge at the IOE is therefore different in several respects from that faced by a multi-faculty, predominantly undergraduate HEI.

 

The project aimed to understand the needs of our three main groups of students: doctoral; taught Masters; and PGCE.  It also investigated  institutional readiness for sustainable change around digital literacies in terms of processes, relationships and staff expertise. 

 

 

Headline achievements

 

We found no evidence with our students of shortfalls in the skills they needed for successful study, including work on placements. Technical ability was either taught as part of programmes, available through existing training or self taught, drawing on available resources or other people where needed. Instead, we found that students were often in positions where they wished to use their skills, but could not, primarily because the infrastructure that they needed to use had been designed in ways that prevented this, or limited their ability to act.

 

Strategic changes include: 

  • The development, presentation and publication of developed accounts of digital literacies, drawing on a sociomaterial perspective. This enabled us to account for the ways in which capable students were rendered 'digitally illiterate' in some situations whilst being successful in others.
  • The development and presentation of an account of organisational change as a "middle out" activity that involves the enrolment of strategically important groups in support of competing policies or projects.
  • The direct representation of distinct student groups, as identified through our baseline work, in the new IT User Group.
  • The development of a policy document to bring IT projects in line with the evidence we have gathered about patterns of academic work. 

 

Key drivers 

 

Each year over 1,000 graduates train as teachers at the IOE on PGCE courses and over 4,000 embark on further degrees. However, historically, these students have either been based in the London region, or have been international students resident to study full-time. The IOE is currently engaged in a strategic review of current provision, aiming to develop its ‘Open Mode’ offering: courses offered in an open, flexible, online or distance format. This includes a complete review of the curriculum; a project to convert face-to-face modules and programmes to new, flexible formats; a project to support the development of staff capacities for teaching in distance, online or in flexible formats; and a project to update the our technical and administrative infrastructure to support remotely-based students. This was initiated following a 2009 strategic review undertaken by PA Consulting, which identified opportunities to take the IOE forward as a sustainable institution, diversifying income streams and building on our reputation for excellence. 

 

This project built on and contributed to such developments by exploring and supporting the needs of our students. Their needs in terms of digital literacies are markedly differently than those of an undergraduate student body, in terms of their prior experience of digital literacies, ‘cultural capital’, and time spent in the institution - the PGCE students spend large sections of the academic year in school placements, many are resident in outer London, and a significant proportion have family commitments. Additionally, many of our taught Masters programmes are part-time / evening, catering for a time-poor, mid-career professional student body. These features present particular challenges for study and also for future careers, and require our students to develop distinctive forms of digital literacies in response. 

 

Organisational context

 

The IOE is a specialist postgraduate institution. Each year over 1,000 graduates train as teachers at the IOE on PGCE courses and over 4,000 embark on postgraduate degrees; it also has around 1,200 academic and professional staff. It has a reputation as the UK’s premier institution for the education and training of teachers and for the educational and social research, gained and sustained for over 100 years. It is the largest university centre of educational research in the UK and one of the largest UK centres of Social Science. It has been a leading performer in education in the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and more recently the UK Higher Education Research Yearbook 2007 named the IOE as the top ranking UK institution for social science research and contract income.

 

The student body is predominantly mature and postgraduate, with many students combining study with work and family responsibilities. Most have been out of formal education for several years, and may never have used digital technologies currently regarded as mainstream in UK higher education. However, they may be users of technologies common in other contexts, including in their personal lives, and are likely to have well-established repertoires of digital practices separate from the IOE. 

 

People at the IOE come from over 100 countries, representing a broad range of educational cultures. Our project was designed to provide a holistic and integrated model of institutional development. To this end, we involved students (both directly as participants, and also as part of the project team, paying for time for SU Sabbatical Officer involvement), academic staff, with the Directors of the Library, Academic Writing Centre and Learning Technologies Unit working together at the core of the project. Senior management support was ensured by involving our project sponsor, the Associate Director for Learning, Teaching and International, as part of our project team; this ensured that our initiatives were consistently informed by and fed into existing institutional developments.

 

The project was focused on our graduate students, although a strand was added in the second year that focused on staff. Our first report (detailed below, under Outputs) drew on data from the iGraduate survey, carried out each year to assess student satisfaction. This provided an overview of all our postgraduate students’ experiences in relation to areas such as technology use. These data lacked detail, and provided little information about the specific needs and issues faced by our students, and our primary conclusion from this phase of work was that the institution was not in possession of a meaningful data set that could provide insights into our students’ practices and needs surrounding digital technologies for their studies and future careers.  We concluded that a qualitative inquiry was necessary, as this methodology would allow us to understand student perceptions, attitudes and experiences in a level of detail which was not revealed by survey research. This was therefore made the priority for subsequent phases of work. However, the analysis did emphasise the need to distinguish between four groups of students: PGCE students, those studying for taught Masters’ degrees, those studying at a distance, and doctoral students. We used this structure to inform the remainder of the project’s work, ensuring that each was represented equally in the data collection that followed.

 

Staff were not the focus for our project, although in the second year an implementation project was undertaken that did focus on staff digital literacies. This was prompted by the response amongst staff to a presentation at the internal Learning and Teaching conference, and was agreed with JISC. This involved four staff who, again, were selected on the basis of their involvement with the four different groups of students, as well as to represent different patterns of technology use.

 

Our baseline work showed that, historically, our students have either been based in the London region, or have been international students resident to study full-time. Teaching provision was primarily face-to-face; the IOE did not pursue opportunities for distance education in an active way, although there was a small number of collaborations with the University of London International Programme.

 

Staff and students' digital literacies were not a focus of institutional attention, although some groundwork was provided by earlier JISC and Higher Education Academy funded project. In 2006, an institutional benchmarking project documented institutional quality processes associated with e-learning, concluding that there were pockets of excellent practice but that these were not widely shared, and that little information existed about technology use. A follow-on Pathfinder project (PREEL) built connections between researchers and practitioners across the IOE to share approaches to using technology. This led to modules being re-developed and generated frameworks and models ("pedagogical templates") for using technology to make teaching more flexible. A strategic review in 2009 by PA Consulting identified "Open Mode" provision as a priority area for strategic development. This sought to expand the IOE's teaching portfolio by supporting the development of courses offered in an open, flexible, online or distance format. As part of this, a survey was undertaken, asking staff (academic and administrative) involved in course delivery and support about their experiences of using technology, and about their priorities for its development. The primary concern was for better use to be made of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE); other common concerns were for wider use of synchronous conferencing to support activities like tutorials and exam boards, and an interest in audio and video capture of teaching.

 

Although the Strategic Review Implementation Programme only lasted one year, when it ended, it was agreed that Open Mode should remain a priority for the IOE. Diana Laurillard was made Associate Director for Open Mode, creating a structural responsibility for this area. A new Learning and Teaching Strategy was launched (2011-2014) that has further implications for staff and student digital literacies. For example, there is a commitment to supporting internationalisation and diversity in the student body "whether as part of an online community" or otherwise, and the commitment that “The IOE will continue to explore and develop approaches to e-learning and distance learning”. The library further committed "to extend the range of resources in digital form to support open mode delivery, to provide training in information skills for academic and professional staff as well as to develop the critical and ethical information literacy skills of students." Finally, the strategy identifies the following as a key objective: Further develop and support e-learning, open mode and digital technologies, in order to provide a flexible learning environment, undertaking this where appropriate with other Bloomsbury colleges and developing new initiatives and relationships with national and international partners.

 

Other related developments have focused on students. For example, the Student Handbook contains a section entitled, Student Entitlement to Teaching and Support, which includes reference to uses of digital technologies. The Student Charter also includes a section on the Learning Environment, although the only direct reference to technology concerns provision of an IOE email account. The section on the Student Support Environment additionally includes a commitment to provide a computing service, including access to computers that can be used for writing and communication.

 

Structurally, the IOE supports staff and students in several ways. All staff are provided with a desktop PC and conventional Office and internet applications, as well as a shared filestore for cross-IOE work. A wireless network is provided, including authentification via Eduroam. Students have computing cluster rooms and terminals in the Library. Staff and students are given a user account and an IOE email address, although we know that at least some of our students would prefer to use an existing email account instead.

 

The Library provides access to a world-leading collection of resources. In recent years, the library has dramatically increased access to electronic texts, including online journals, e-books, electronic copies of theses and a pre-print collection of publications by IOE staff.

 

The Institution's VLE was replaced during the period of this project, moving from a hosted service from Blackboard, with a licence shared across the Bloomsbury Consortium (the IOE, Birkbeck, SOAS, the RVC, LSHTM) to a Bloomsbury cluster of Moodle instances, hosted by ULCC.

 

At the level of skills, various groups provide support for staff and students. Staff Development at the IOE coordinates the work of IT Services, the Learning Technologies Unit and others in providing training. The majority of workshops, 'taster' sessions and lunchtime discussions (aimed at awareness raising or discussing ideas) that are offered can be characterised as operating at the 'skills' level, addressing the "how to" of technology use. This includes recurrent training around commonly used applications (including Office applications, for example) as well as training offered in response to identified demand (e.g. current training in the use of Moodle, which is being deployed as a replacement to Blackboard). Additionally, self-study resources are available to staff and students for a variety of applications.

 

The Library also provides support and training in relation to information literacies, including online resources such as a virtual library induction. IT Services also provides staff with access to Media Services, a team that can undertake media production work.

 

Students develop their digital literacies primarily in the context of their programmes of study, which will introduce them to any specific applications or resources that they need to use. Other areas of support are provided by groups such as the Academic Writing Centre.

 

Staff are supported primarily through peer-led sessions, including faculty learning and teaching committee discussion sessions, programme team meetings, lunchtime discussion groups, etc. Support for curriculum design, development and delivery is also provided by the Learning Technologies Unit, primarily through workshops and consultancy-style meetings.

 

Project approach

 

The overall approach of the project was informed directly by Jisc’s existing framework for digital literacies (access, skills, practices, identity), and by research that built on New Literacy Studies and sociomaterial theory.

 

We pursued a strongly evidence-based approach, working throughout the project to document existing practices and use this as the basis for the creation of materials, interventions and institutional policy. In this sense, all of the project’s activities were evaluative.

 

The project’s first phase of baseline work, which involved re-analysing iGraduate data on student satisfaction, made it clear that the institution was not in possession of a meaningful data set about students’ practices and needs in relation to digital literacies. This was seen as a cause for concern, given the central role that technologies now play in higher education teaching and learning, research and writing, and also given the fact that the IOE is tasked with producing world-class postgraduates capable of assuming positions of responsibility in teaching and learning, curriculum development and a range of other functions – or in the case of PhDs making a significant contribution to research – all of which now takes place in contexts of practice where confidence and capability with a range of digital technologies is essential.

 

Addressing this required in-depth qualitative data, focusing on day-to-day student practices, needs and experiences. As a first step in that process, ethics clearance was granted for focus groups, which were conducted with the four groups of students identified above. The focus groups were video-recorded, to allow for accurate transcription of the group discussions. In the case of the distance students (who were spread across several countries) the focus group was conducted and recorded via the virtual classroom Elluminate, utilising voice chat. The focus group findings confirmed that there were significant differences between these four groups, highlighting the need for the IOE to provide spaces for online engagement that recognise the context-specific access needs, practices and identities of our diverse groups of students. For example, for the Masters students, Blackboard is the primary technological site of practice - in this case, the salient technology is acting as a key interface between the institution and the student. The PhD student data, in contrast, suggests that technologies for them are primarily about investigation, detection and sourcing of information individually, primarily through library systems. For the PGCE students, the role of technologies seemed to be largely to enhance teaching practice on school placement, or to enable smooth transitions between contexts of school, home and the IOE. Finally, for the distance students, technology appeared to represent a space that could enable – or present barriers – to the formation of an online community.

 

The next stage of the project required deepening our understanding of these issues by undertaking a longitudinal, multimodal journaling study with twelve students, selected to represent the four groups identified above, as well as a diversity of backgrounds (nationality, gender, etc). Each participant took part in 3-4 interviews, of around 1-1.5 hours each, and generated visual data by taking photos, video and notes using an iPod touch provided for them as part of the project. While the analysis of this dataset is still ongoing, the journaling work demonstrated just how central (multimodal) texts are to students’ engagement in Higher Education. Finding, working with and producing texts were essential components of study for all student groups, although the kinds of texts they worked with and their means of accessing these differed considerably. Another recurrent theme was the management of boundaries between personal, professional and study life: for some students, this involved using one area where they were in control and successful to support others (e.g. undertaking study in the home, or using an IOE email account to apply for jobs because this was felt to lend credibility to the submission), whereas for others, it was about ensuring these were kept separate (e.g. by using parallel email accounts, social networks, etc).

 

The analysis also showed markedly different orientations towards uses of technology (but did not support the idea that students might fall into ‘types’ in line with this, as their orientations varied depending on task and context). The first of these orientations we described as ‘curation’, generating and marshaling texts that included print, digital books and articles, emails, recorded lectures, images, video, etc. These were stored, ordered, edited and recombined in order to produced new texts that satisfied the requirements of their courses. The next orientation was ‘combat’, which was characterized by a sense of confrontational with and suspicion of technology. In this orientation, technology was seen as not entirely under students’ control, sometimes controlling them in the way they were required to work, or bringing together personal, professional and/or study lives in ways they would rather avoid. Finally, there was ‘coping’, where students struggled with the demands made on them, given the resources available to them, and made do as best they could by drafting in personal resources, friends or relations.

 

Throughout the project, we maintained dialogue with our partner sector bodies; within the institution, we also reported to key decision making bodies such as Teaching Committee, and presented updates on the work periodically. This led to changes in direction for the project, such as the staff-focused intervention undertaken in year two, and to the submission of institutional policy papers on topics such as the institution’s IT strategy.

 

Our approach to strategic change was to work with existing institutional structures, rather than trying to create a new system and impose this on the institution. At its most simple, this was achieved by forming the project team around the directors of institutional services (Library, Academic Writing Centre and the Learning Technologies Unit). Additionally, while we worked with senior sponsors and with individual staff and students, following conventional ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches to change, we also intervened in a political and opportunistic way to support contested positions that were consistent with the project’s goals by providing them with evidence that supported their agendas. (This approach was the focus for a presentation made to the JISC online conference, 2012.)

 

While the project did not set out to engineer new relationships between staff, or between staff and students, the intervention projects in the second year did result in modest and specific developments. For example, the use of synchronous audio conference piloted in the Academic Writing Centre has resulted in more responsive and flexible forms of student support. Similarly, staff development was not a central aim; however, development took place through participation in the studies (through reflection on personal practice) and for the support service teams involved in the implementation projects (through their evaluation of practice).

 

The project’s work was widely communicated, using a variety of channels. Internally, the services involved in the project were kept up to date through informal briefings by project team members; committees were briefed through formal papers and oral updates; staff more generally were briefed annually at the Learning and Teaching conference; and responsibility for student communication was taken by the Students’ Union sabbatical officer on the team. Externally, the project’s approach and findings were presented at a range of practitioner and research events, which included both invited presentations and keynotes. Publications based on the work have been developed and submitted, and the first of these have now been published. A blog site was set up for the project and maintained throughout, providing updates on the project’s work, and links to resources such as presentations on Slideshare. Interactions with related projects were pursued through programme and cluster meetings. Other meetings were also undertaken, for example, with Dave White from Oxford on links between this project and the Digital Visitor/Resident work.

 

Outputs

 

This section will refer to the deliverables identified in the original project bid, and will also described unanticipated deliverables which were produced. See also Project Outputs in the blog.

 

A project blog

 

sociomaterial framework for analysing and shaping institutional change. This involves tracing the way policy texts enrol particular stakeholder groups, and reinforcing or undermining this arrangement to advance the project's aims. This was presented as part of the Jisc online conference

 

In association in ALT, four interactive webinars showcasing papers from the Research in Learning Technology Special Issue on Digital Literacies and Digital Scholarship (editors Lesley Gourlay, Martin Oliver and Norm Friesen). The webinar recordings and slides are available in the Design Studio.

 

Resources developed in collaboration with SEDA - a series of Open Educational Resources have been developed in collaboration with SEDA; these have been authored by Lindsay Jordan. The resources are available on the design studio. They build on the work we undertook with academic staff, and are intended for use in academic development courses or workshops; they could, however, be adapted for use with students, or as data collection processes for research projects.

 

Resources developed in collaboration with SCONUL, for library professionals

Nazlin Bhimani and Barbara Sakarya have developed, in consultation with SCONUL, an interactive LibGuide that draws together key messages, resources and evidence about the implications of the project for libraries.

 

Exemplar materials for the use of Collaborate to support Academic Writing

This suite of resources, developed by Stephen Hill, presents outputs from one of the intervention studies undertaken in the second year of the project. It consists of: 

  • A report on the experience of moving academic writing sessions online.
  • A lesson plan for the session, made available as an Open Educational Resource.
  • The session materials, made available as an Open Educational Resource.

 

Key findings resource

A slideshow giving an overview of the key findings of our project: IOE key findings.ppsx

 

Methodology resource

A slideshow providing an overview of the project methodology and guidance for applying similar methods to research or development, including issues surrounding ethics: IOE methodology.ppsx

 

Papers, reports and talks

 

 

Benefits and beneficiaries

 

There have been a range of benefits accruing form the implementation case studies described in the previous section. 

 

The online synchronous academic writing course was well-received by the participants, and was an extremely valuable learning experience for the Academic Writing Centre team, in particularly the tutor (Stephen Hill) who ran the project and analysed the focus group data and also took part in a reflective interview together with the researcher supporting this development. He has developed a reusable online version of this 8-hour course, and as a result this online synchronous provision will form part of the standard offer of the AWC from academic year 2013/14 onwards. Our presentation at the IOE Teaching and Learning Conference 2013 on this pilot was well received by staff from other departments, and as a result we have been approached by the research officer for the IOE Open Mode Initiative, in order to disseminate the experience we have gained more from this intervention more broadly across the institution. We believe this initiative is the first of its kind in writing development / EAP in the UK (possibly internationally), and it was very well received by peer practitioners at the specialist international BALEAP (British Association for Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes) biannual conference.

 

The staff case study is groundbreaking in research terms, and has generated a good deal of interest as a result. Key findings were that staff participants undertake their academic work in a highly complex range of different physical contexts including the home, transport and other locations in addition to the office setting. This generates a range of implications for institutions in terms of how staff work should be conceptualized, supported and developed in terms of digital literacies. Our workshop at the SEDA (Staff Education and Development Association) conference was well-received by practitioners from a range of institutional contexts. It showcased a ‘mapping’ resource which can be used as part of academic development to raise awareness of digital literacy practices and generate discussion around the implications for academic and teaching practice. This was picked up and actively promoted by a Jisc Involve blog.  An internal policy document has also been produced on the basis of these findings, making a range of recommendations to the IT User Group. This report have been referred up for the consideration of the Information Strategy Committee and if accepted will lead to a series of changes in terms of how patterns of resource and support for IOE staff use of technologies, not only in the traditional office setting but also taking into account the mobile and distributed nature of contemporary academic work. Issue raised by this report have also been incorporated into a survey sent to all staff members of staff in the coming academic year, which will inform future strategic developments.

 

The Library focus group data provided some invaluable insights into student uses of the LibGuide resources. The content of the guides received very positive feedback, and students made some suggestions about the interface could be improved by moving a more multimodal approach, as opposed to predominantly textual.  

 

 

Other impacts

 

The project has had a valuable impact internationally in shifting thinking about digital literacies away from generic, decontextualised taxonomies of personal competences, and towards accounts that are able to explain relationships between individuals, resources and settings. Evidence for interest in this perspective can be seen in invited keynotes on this topic in Ireland and at Oxford University, as well as presentations at ALT-C, the SEDA conference, the SRHE's digital universities network and SRHE conference, to the Heads of ELearning forum and at the Theorising the Web conference in New York.

 

Additionally, an unexpected impact can be seen in our editorship of the Special Issue of Research in Learning Technology focusing on ‘Scholarship and Literacies in a Digital Age’.  These were showcased in a series of ALT webinars - the recordings and slides are available in the Design Studio.

 

Another unexpected impact came with the SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education) Event ‘New Approaches to Digital Literacies’. This was organised  by the project manager as co-convenor of the Digital University networks, and was held in conjunction with the SRHE Postgraduate Issues Network.

 

The project with staff and the report on patterns of academic work that followed from this has provided an accessible language for describing patterns of academic work, which was immediately adopted by readers of the report, allowing a more sophisticated and evidenced-based account of academic work than we were previously able to provide. This claim is based on committee participation, so anecdotal in the first instance, although we expect this to be confirmed through committee minutes and the language used in an institutional survey next year. In relation to the study of staff digital literacies, the evidence base we have developed will be further extended through a survey of IT users that is currently being developed. The survey will include questions about the three categories of work we have identified (office, home, peripatetic) in order to gather further evidence about the prevalence and user experience of these. In this way, our project’s findings will be sustained through an ongoing commitment to evidence-based policy in our institution, with the data shaped by the project’s work.

 

Sustaining and embedding

 

To follow 

 

Lessons learned and reflections

In our project, a key finding in terms of change management was that the classic opposition of "top down" and "bottom up" change failed to explain how the project could achieve institutional change. Instead, opportunistic "middle out" change proved most effective: spotting institutional developments and either weaving them through our analysis work, or supporting particular initiatives by providing them with the evidence base they needed to secure institutional support and resourcing. (We presented on this model of institutional change to the Jisc online conference as described above).

 

A further key message from our project which we have elaborated throughout is that taxonomic and generic accounts of digital literacies - although pragmatically useful in some contexts - are inadequate and even misleading as dominant models for understanding this complex area of student and academic practice. We have learned that digital literacy consists of complex interactions between social actors, devices, technologies and texts in a range of domains. As such, we have reached the conclusion that digital literacies cannot meaningfully be reduced to skills or attributes, but should instead be regarded as orientations towards engagement with digitally mediated study, focusing on how students cope with complexity, curate the multiplicity of digital texts they encounter, and forge their multiple identities in the process. This reconceptualisation has implications for institutional development and practice at all levels, moving the focus away from training towards a finite and measurable body of observable skills, and towards flexibility and recognition of issues such as complexity and overload in the design and curation of the ‘the student experience’.