Digital Skills

 

What are Digital Skills for Highly Skilled Employment?

We have made a short video presentation explaining what we mean by digital skills that support Highly Skilled Employment. It explains that we are talking about:

  • Transferable skills and knowledge around digital technologies
  • Not just using technologies themselves but understanding them and their social implications
  • Students with the confidence and capability to adapt existing knowledge and skills, and learn new ones as technology evolves
  • Developing digital capability isn’t as simple as “learning to use _____ (e.g. Excel)”.
  • It is instead fundamental knowledge and problem solving strategies which can help with learning any technology and its application

 

What do I need to do or understand?

To support the development of student digital skills, a new website (Hallam Digital Skills) has been created to support students. It is located in the IT & Library tab in MyHallam. We would like staff to have a look at it and encourage students to use it.

LinkedIn Learning is a website with thousands of online video courses on a range of subjects, including many about digital technologies and their application. We have purchased a license for all staff, students and recent graduates to use it. We would like staff to have a look through and see if there are resources there which could support your students. There will be an integration with Blackboard shortly which allows you to put LinkedIn Learning content straight into your Blackboard sites.

We are also piloting a digital diagnostic tool developed by Jisc that could help students (and staff) identify their strengths and areas for development in terms of digital skills. Based on these pilot approaches we will be looking at how we roll the tool out more widely during the 20/21 academic year.

We have developed a generic curriculum map of digital capabilities students need for highly skilled employment. We want all courses to go through a process of contextualising these capabilities and thinking about how they develop digital skills in their students. We will be arranging workshops with departments and subject areas during this academic year to support staff with this process, which will ensure our courses are fully prepared for delivering digital skills in the 20/21 academic year.

Resources