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

2. 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

3. 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 -

4. 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

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. 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 ( )
among school leavers (2014)
in FE (2014)
among online learners (2016)

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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

12. Exploring the tracker questions
HE Student questions:
Web site:
Guidance on engaging students:

13. 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
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
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.

14. 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

15. 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.

16. Find out more… Digital Student project Ruth.Drysdale@jisc.ac.uk
#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

17. 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

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

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

20. 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)

21. 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%

22. 2. Jisc Digital Discovery Tool

23. Benchmark Comparisons

24. 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

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

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

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

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

29. 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).”

30. 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.

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

32. Active Learning @Abertayuni

33. 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

34. Where next? Evaluation of new facilities
Digital Literacy and graduate employability
Next strategic planning phase and our forthcoming new TLE strategy.
Image credit:

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