The UCL Digital Education Baseline: What it is (and is not)

When teaching moves online, the transition is often framed in terms of relocating course materials through digital technologies. From this perspective, the central challenge becomes making those materials available within a digital environment (for example, Moodle).

What this framing tends to overlook is a key consequence of moving online: the loss of the immediacy that physical teaching environments provide, along with the accompanying opportunities to explain, clarify, support, notice, or address signs of difficulty early.

Online environments can support learners, but only if that support is deliberately built in. In face-to-face teaching, many opportunities for clarification and repair arise naturally through co-presence. In online environments, learners may experience difficulties accessing materials and tools, understanding expectations, or knowing how and where to seek help. These difficulties can remain unseen and, if unaddressed, persist over time.

In online and blended environments, the UCL Digital Education Baseline supports staff in making the course learning environment clear and visible to all students. It does this by setting out the structure, orientation, expectations, and sources of support.

A common foundation for online (and blended) courses

At UCL, the Baseline is expressed as concise guidance organised around six core areas. Rather than prescribing particular pedagogical approaches, it sets out minimum expectations concerned with orientation, clarity, and access to support in digital learning environments. Its guiding principles are relevant whether staff are developing a short course, a module, or contributing to a larger programme, and whilst it can be used retrospectively, for example, to review an existing course, its value is greatest when it informs the initial design of a course, shaping what students can expect.

Framed in this way, the Baseline helps shape students’ experience both when they first encounter the course and over time: through clear structure and signposting for early orientation, intentional sequencing that clarifies expectations, and making key information visible (such as communication channels, feedback timelines, and routes to support).

By making expectations, purpose, and support visible alongside course content, students can rely on a stable and predictable digital environment, regardless of prior experience of studying online.

Making expectations explicit

Learning does not depend on immediacy. In online settings, where teaching is mediated largely through materials and tools, learners rely more on how expectations, purpose, and support are communicated through the digital environment. The examples below illustrate situations the Baseline addresses, particularly where expectations remain implicit.

When expectations are not carried by the environment, students must reconstruct them through inference, memory, or persistence.

Sequencing of materials

The order in which learners encounter content is shaped by how materials are organised and signposted within the course. When readings, multimedia, activities, and assessments are presented without a clear sequence or guidance, learners must decide for themselves what to engage with first and how different elements relate. In the absence of explicit cues about purpose and priority, learners may be left unsure whether this openness is a deliberate pedagogic choice or a gap in communication.

Access to materials

Access to course materials is often mediated entirely through the digital environment. When access is difficult, engagement becomes contingent on learners’ ability to work around these barriers. Examples include broken links, tools requiring unexpected logins, or documents (including readings) incompatible with assistive technologies.

Visibility of key information

Important guidance, such as assessment expectations, deadlines, or core readings, is often distributed across multiple pages, documents, or announcements. When this information is duplicated, embedded, or inconsistently located, learners are required to remember where it was previously encountered. This reliance on memory and inference makes access to essential information less predictable, placing additional strain on learners as they attempt to locate guidance when it is needed.

Supporting time management

Online learners often engage in short, fragmented periods and may return to the course multiple times across a week. Without an indication of how much time an activity is likely to take, including the signalling of core and optional tasks, learners are left to make their own estimates, making planning around other commitments more difficult.

How the Baseline can shape early conversations with colleagues

Engaging with the Baseline early helps staff frame more focused conversations with specialist colleagues such as librarians, learning technologists, and content developers, so that questions of access, licensing, format, and technical feasibility can be considered while options remain open.

At programme level, shared engagement with the Baseline can reduce avoidable variation in structure, navigation, and communication across courses, supporting more predictable conditions for learners.

What sits outside the Baseline

The Baseline provides an infrastructure that makes expectations, routes to clarification, and support visible in digital environments, particularly where all the cues that immediacy affords cannot be relied upon. It establishes shared conditions under which students can navigate, access, and make sense of a course when learning is mediated through digital systems.

The Baseline is not a substitute for subject pedagogy. Decisions about how concepts are introduced and developed, when interaction is educationally necessary, or what kinds of thinking students are expected to undertake at different points, are disciplinary decisions and remain with academic judgement.

Equally, the Baseline does not replace learning design. Learning design draws on theories of learning and educational research to intentionally structure learning activities, assessment, and progression over time, translating pedagogic intentions into coherent learning experiences.

Together, these distinctions position the Baseline as providing the conditions within which effective pedagogy and learning design can operate, rather than replacing them.