How are student views of their digital environment changing? Ruth Drysdale Jisc

Introducing you… 2 mins Think about your personal ‘digital superpower’ What technology do you use everyday? What digital habits do other people ask you for advice with? What are you proud of doing well with digital tech? Write your digital superpower on a post-it note and stick it to you. Introduce yourself and your superpower to a neighbour. Before we think about Students engaging with the digital environment whilst studying at your institution, here is a short warm up activity Who has seen the latest Avengers film – how many super hero's did it have in it? Aren't we all superheroes now days? We are certainly all expected to do more with less, we all have our own super powers – So now I would like you to think about what is your digital superpower? So we all have some great digital supper powers Now lets consider the digital environment that students come into when they study at your institution

Theme: Using Qualitative and Quantitative approaches to enhance student retention, achievement and employability Qualitative Quantitative retention ? achievement employability As more and more communication, business and learning processes and content gets digitalised, there are many ways to collect data about students’ and teachers behaviours So we can do more learning or learner analytics More is beginning to be done on Teaching analytics – and initiatives like TEF use proxy data NSS, Destinations/outcomes data to infer teaching quality But how do you capture qualitative data about their experience, either physical or digital? Feedback -

Why the student digital experience matters Often students' first experiences Many courses now hybrid/blended Students want to use their own devices and services Students expect university to prepare them for digital workplaces Affects students' sense of wellbeing and belonging We all know that first impressions count and often the 1st experience students will have of your institutions will be in a digital format during their application process. I understand that Admissions teams are doing a great job welcoming students and getting accepted usually using CRM systems. But what happens once the students come on campus - a lot of freshers communications will be through various online communication platforms

HOW Visit menti.com enter code 52 71 10 How do you gather your students’ expectations and experiences of digital technology at your university or college?

What universities and colleges wanted Stakeholders said: interest in the ‘digital student’ findings appetite to find out more locally, engage students in their own digital experience no existing instruments, surveys or quality processes captured the digital experience organisations wanted something proven, easy to administer, credible, and actionable.

A brief history of the ‘Digital Experience Insights’ service (aka Tracker) Reviewed students’ expectations and experiences of the digital curriculum, environment and services: in HE (2013-2014) among school leavers (2014) in FE (2014) among online learners (2016) http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org

Digital Experience Insights The survey cycle Enhance Service Collect Improve Digital Experience Insights Student tracker Staff tracker Jisc consultancy Tracker Launch Sector analysis Organisational Experts panel Insight drives organisational improvement Change initiated Review of service scope & question set Enhance service Analyse Review & reflect Sector analysis Data collection

Provided by institution Supported by teaching staff What is the Digital Experience Insights service? …………………… not just another survey Digital curriculum Provided by institution How would you rate the quality of digital provision (software, hardware, learning environment)? How would you rate the quality of digital teaching and learning on your course? Supported by teaching staff You and your digital Digital at your institution Digital on your course Attitude to digital learning Student tracker You and your digital technology Organisational infrastructure Your digital teaching Your professional development Teaching staff tracker Digital Experience Insights Digital environment

Questions for organisations How are you investing? How are you engaging students? How good are your strategies for digital learning, BYOD? …

The Digital Experience Insights Service A tried and tested set of surveys, made up of: Closed questions that can be benchmarked Open questions for local analysis Can add institutional questions A Community of Practice around the tracker process and findings (including student representatives) Compare student feedback with teaching staff views and organisational factors

Exploring the tracker questions HE Student questions: http://bit.ly/HEtracker18 Web site: http://ji.sc/student-tracker Guidance on engaging students: http://bit.ly/trackerguide

What we’ve learned about it Survey instrument is robust Organisations value the process: Actionable evidence for change Benchmark against others; monitor progress Better informed decisions about digital services Support for student engagement and an international community of practice 2018 open pilot has 105 institutions with over 50,000 respondents Huge interest in our aggregated findings http://bit.ly/jisctracker17 http://bit.ly/tracker17brief As an outcome of the digital student work and the need to gather quantitative data on students digital experience at an organisational level and at a sector level, we developed the student digital experience tracker as a survey tool with a robust set of student tested questions delivered in BOS. See http://bit.ly/jiscdigidataservice This evidence supports discussions with senior managers The report containing the summary findings from 2017 surveys will be available from 20th June from web link on this slide.

What we’ve learned from 2017 pilot: How students use their devices Make note/ recordings, and look for additional resources Organise their study time Access learning on the move Discuss learning informally on social media

Digital safety and wellbeing More could be done by providers to support students with digital safety and wellbeing My learning provider expects me to behave respectfully in online spaces (% agree) I know where to get help from my learning provider if I being bullied or harassed online (% agree) My learning provider helps me stay safe online (% agree) Looking at the area of support, safety and wellbeing we looked at access to resources/advice and expectations in terms of behaviour. When comparing HE and FE, it’s interesting to note that high proportions of HE learners indicate that their provider expects them to behave respectfully online. Learners appear that this appears to be an expectation on their part , but they are less likely to agree that their learning provider gives them the support or information they need to stay safe online- only 57% agree with this statement or that they know where to get help from their provider if they are being bullied or harassed online with only 67% agreeing with this statement This suggests that there is more that could be done by providers to support and educate learners and making this information more visible.

Find out more… Digital Student project Ruth.Drysdale@jisc.ac.uk http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org #digitalstudent Go to ‘View’ menu > ‘Header and Footer…’ to edit the footers on this slide (click ‘Apply’ to change only the currently selected slide, or ‘Apply to All’ to change the footers on all slides). Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC-BY-NC- ND

Taking an evidence-based approach October last year New job, new central service – doing this differently Where am I? Where am I going? How will I know when I get there? Looking for clues: Meet with senior team Speak to students Ask colleagues ‘anecdotal picture’ Lee Ballantyne Head of Education Futures

A picture tells a thousand words… 1000 visits Monthly visits to VLE

“Baseline activities” Jisc Digital Student Tracker Jisc Digital Discovery Tool (for staff) Jisc Accessibility and Inclusion Review VLE Review Snapshot report

1. Jisc Digital Student Tracker Ran from mid-February to mid-March 468 responses, across all campuses and across all schools Results by School allows targeted support Overall increase in number who would like more use of Moodle A significant number of respondents indicated that they were not provided with pre-course information on the digital skills they would need Digital skills are important in my career v. course prepares me for the digital workplace (widening gap on last years’ results) (only 65% of our future teachers! 12% disagreed…) (almost all think dig skills important, nearly half would like more dig tech to be used – OPEN DOOR)

Benchmark comparisons The Jisc system allows us to compare our data with total data from 57 other UK HE institutions that ran the tracker (see table below) Overall, we’re generally tracking slightly behind other institutions in these metrics Question Our data UK data Across institution: digital provision Overall rating 74% 88% Own device support 68% 70% Reliable WIFI 66% 82% On course: digital teaching and learning 71% Preparation for digital workplace 45% 41% Up-to-date industry standard software 51% 59%

2. Jisc Digital Discovery Tool

Benchmark Comparisons

3. Jisc Accessibility & Inclusion Review Pre-visit and onsite analysis Effective platforms and processes Digitally capable staff and learners Effective curriculum Themes: More guidance and support More consistency More encouragement and promotion

4. Internal VLE Review Focus on engagement Audit of usage, engagement, activities & assessment Internal qualitative research 121s Focus groups Landscape review?

5. Snapshot Report Key themes Clues Benchmarking highlights Short, medium, and longer term aims Baseline for measuring impact Further investigation required

Questions? Thank you Lee.Ballantyne@uws.ac.uk @Lee_Ballantyne

Abertay University- seeing teaching and learning differently Alastair Robertson, Director of TLE

The ‘Sticky’ Campus Creating the right on-campus environment and spaces where students will want to come and stay! “The academic literature is clear that students who have a strong sense of belonging and feel part of the University community are more likely to do better academically, form closer relationships with their peers and academic staff and are more likely to complete their studies (see e.g. the work of Tinto). Active, collaborative learning and social participation are key to forming learning communities (Wenger).”

Active Learning @Abertayuni Note range of sandpits- changing pedagogy- challenging for students and staff. Academic literature shows more active or experiential learning leads to deeper student understanding e.g. Dewey, Kolb.

Active Learning @Abertayuni Heading Position: H – 8.09, v - .48 Font Calibri (body) size 32

Active Learning @Abertayuni

Working with Learning analytics Influencing student behaviour Student support interventions are key 2. Student Digital Experience tracker Students’ uses of technologies, including feedback on new learning spaces Links into graduate employability agenda Abertay’s survey closed last week, 340+ responses Mention range of studies occurring across the world. Workshop this afternoon with Sarah Davies and Niall Sclater

Where next? Evaluation of new facilities Digital Literacy and graduate employability Next strategic planning phase and our forthcoming new TLE strategy. Image credit: http://www.eurotimes.org/what-lies-ahead-eurotimes-cover-story-on-the-future-of-cataract-and-refractive-surgery/

Questions? Thank you Ruth.Drysdale@Jisc.ac.uk