UCL will be participating in the beta pilot of the Jisc digital capability discovery tool for staff and students which will run from December 2017 to May 2018.

The Jisc digital capability discovery tool has been designed to support staff across higher and further education and skills. It helps individuals to identify and reflect on their digital capability – particularly in relation to their work roles – and to develop their confidence through tailored feedback, ‘next steps’, and links to resources. Questions and feedback are mapped to the Jisc Six elements digital capability framework to provide a holistic view of the skills required. The discovery tool can also help managers and team leaders understand what support would be most helpful for their staff.

The tool uses the Potenial.ly platform and has tailored questions with one set for students and one for staff. The questions have been designed to capture the digital capabilities required to be successful in an educational context.

Users of the tool will respond to a series of questions that allow them to reflect on the digital skills they have already acquired and identify possible new ones. Feedback will include a digital capability profile and a summarised list of suggested actions.

We’ll be making more announcements in the next couple of weeks providing information on how students and staff at UCL can access the tool.

If you would like to get involved in the pilot at UCL please contact Moira Wright.

Additional links:
Jisc Building digital capability project site: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability
Jisc Digital Capability Blog: https://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/

In early 2016, ISD (Information Services Division) carried out the first Staff and Student IT Survey using TechQual+. Over 1,000 of you completed the survey, and over the past 16 months we have been working hard to improve our services in response to your comments.

Below are just a few examples of changes that have been made as a result of the feedback received from the TechQual+ survey run in 2016:

Wi-Fi                        

A substantial investment in replacing and upgrading our Wi-Fi technology infrastructure

Service Desk

We’ve invested in staffing, tools and training to speed up response times and improve quality.

We’ve partnered with an external organisation and altered shift patterns to provide additional out of hours’ support.

Printing                 

We’ve rolled out 170+ additional printers over the past 18 months, targeting the busiest areas. This takes the current total to 660 printers. In areas of high usage, we’ve introduced new high capacity printers.

Infrastructure

We have invested in storage and now all staff and students can store 100GB for free.

Computers

We are continuing to invest in additional cluster PCs, and loan laptops where there isn’t space for desktops. We added a further 550 desktops and 60 laptops by September 2017.
We operate one of the largest laptop loan services across UK universities – 266 laptops across 12 locations – and this year a further 60 laptops were added.

Training

We delivered 221 courses last academic year, that’s nearly 1000 hours of training with about 3000 people attending.  We are working hard to publicise the courses we offer.

Audio Visual

In 2016 ISD invested £2.5m into improving the technology in teaching facilities. Approximately 70 centrally bookable spaces had their facilities updated; this included bringing 43 spaces in 20 Bedford Way up to the standard spec including installation of Lecturecast in approx. 30 spaces.  Lecturecast was also installed at 22 Gordon Street and Canary Wharf (3 spaces each).  We also refreshed the Lecturecast hardware in 12 rooms.

Based on the findings of focus groups at participating institutions, the TechQual+ project has articulated a set of generalised IT service outcomes that are expected of IT organizations by faculty, students, and staff within higher education. The TechQual+ core survey contains 13 items designed to measure the performance of the following three core commitments: 1) Connectivity and Access, 2)Technology and Collaboration Services, and 3) Support and Training.

The TechQual+ survey will be run again at UCL in December 2017 and we’ll be asking for your help to advertise it to your students, encouraging them (and you!) to complete it. All respondents will be entered into a prize draw with a chance to win some great prizes!

We’ll be providing more information and communications about the survey closer to the opening date.

Central IT services induction talks for new students will take place on Wednesday 27, Thursday 28 and Friday 29 September from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (last talk starts at 1.30 p.m.)

Due to a change of room allocation these are different dates and times to the ones that were previously advertised. 

As in previous years, the talks will take place every half an hour on a rolling basis so students can attend any talk.

Further details and a recorded version of the talk are available on our student induction page.  Further information for students about IT services can be found on the ISD students page.

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The UCL report on the data collected from the Jisc student digital tracker survey (see my previous post on this)  is now available.  The survey was jointly conducted by Birkbeck, LSHTM, RVC, SOAS and UCL back in March. Following a workshop in July, and using the Jisc national survey results as a benchmark, we have been able to make some conclusions and recommendations regarding the digital experiences of our students, based on the survey responses.

You can read more about the BLE consortium in the ‘Jisc Insights from institutional pilots 2017’ report on page 18

http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6671/1/Tracker2017insights.pdf

Please note Appendix C is available on request (moira. wright @ ucl.ac.uk)

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UCL participated in the 2017 Jisc Digital Student Tracker Survey as part of a consortium with the Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) made up of SOAS, Birkbeck, LSHTM and RVC. 74 UK institutions ran the tracker with their students collecting 22,593 student responses, while 10 international universities collected an additional 5,000 student responses

We were the only consortium to participate in the survey and had come together as a result of institutional surveys, such as the National Student Survey, meaning that the time available to run it independently was short (a month) and we therefore felt that our individual sample sizes would be too small. We treated the survey as a pilot and advertised a link to it on each College’s Moodle landing page as well as some promotion via social media and the Student Unions. The survey generated 330 responses, which given our constraints was much more than we expected.

The survey comprises five broad areas: Digital access, digital support and digital learning. Most questions were quantitatively recorded, but there were four open questions, which produced qualitative data. We were also able to choose two additional questions to the survey and we selected e-assessment, since that was a previous shared enhancement project (see www.bloomsbury.ac.uk/assessment) and Moodle, since all members of the consortium use the platform for their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Once the survey closed and we had access to the benchmarking report we ran a workshop for representatives from each of the Colleges in July 2017 whereby the results corresponding to the survey’s open questions were analysed in institutional groups, which facilitated interesting discussions over commonalities and potential implications.

Sarah Sherman, the BLE Manager and myself, have been working to produce a report which will examine our collective responses to the survey in comparison with the national survey population with a recommendation that individual Colleges independently analyse their own results in more detail. For confidentiality, each College will be presented with a version of this document, which contains the relevant data for their institution only and not the complete BLE data set. A disadvantage of the consortium approach was that we were not able to benchmark individual Colleges to the survey population as the resources would not allow for this. In the future, the participating Colleges may wish to run the survey individually rather than as part of a collective as it was not possible to conduct deep analysis with this data set. 

Although the sample size collected by the Bloomsbury Colleges was small and not statistically viable, there is much we can extract and learn from this exercise. For the most part, our collective responses tended to fall within the margins set by the national survey population, which means we are all at a similar phase in our student’s digital capability and development.

You will have to wait for the full report for more information on the UCL data collected but just to whet the appetite you can see the key findings from Jisc in this 2 page report: Student digital experience tracker at a glance .

Finally, you can see this collection of case studies, which features the Bloomsbury Colleges consortium, here.

Please get in touch with me if you would like to get involved (moira.wright @ ucl.ac.uk)

Sarah Sherman and Moira Wright

Jisc/ NUS student digital experience benchmarking tool 

Jisc guide to enhancing the digital student experience: a strategic approach

How should institutions respond to students’ changing expectations of their digital environment? What experiences at university prepare students to flourish in a digital world? What are institutions doing to engage students in dialogue about their learning environment and to gather intelligence about their changing needs?

Following a successful pilot with 24 institutions in 2016 a student digital tracker tool, built on resources such as the Jisc/ NUS student digital experience benchmarking tool  and the Jisc guide to enhancing the digital student experience: a strategic approach. The questions cover issue important to learners and/or to staff with a focus on the learning experience.

The student digital experience tracker will allow universities, colleges and skills providers to:

• Gather evidence from learners about their digital experience, and track changes over time
• Make better informed decisions about the digital environment
• Target resources for improving digital provision
• Plan other research, data gathering and student engagement around digital issues
• Demonstrate quality enhancement and student engagement to external bodies and to students themselves

The tracker is delivered in BOS – an online survey service specially developed for the UK education sector. Institutions using the tracker will receive guidance on implementation in BOS, real-time access to their own data, are able to benchmark their data against their sector data, and access further guidance on how to understand and respond to the findings.

UCL students are invited to participate in the survey and a link has been added to students Moodle landing page on the right side. Alternatively you can access the survey using this link: http://tinyurl.com/ble-student-survey-2017 – please advertise to UCL  students. The survey is open until March 31st 2017.