Tuesday 9th May 2017

Aston University Conference Centre, Birmingham

The aims of the community are apparently to:

• Support a community of practice to share approaches to the development of staff and students’ digital capabilities (less obvious at this meeting but perhaps this aim will develop as time goes on).
• Develop our understanding around how organisations are developing their approaches to digital capability (a lot of focus on this).
• Gather ideas to inform new areas of JISC work on building digital capability (this did not come across at the meeting at all).
• Share examples of effective institutional practice and research in this area and enable discussion across further education and skills in higher education (again a lot of focus on this).

Helen Beetham presented about how institutions are developing different approaches to digital capabilities using various examples of the case study institutions she has been working with. This was quite interesting.

We then heard from two institutions about how they are supporting staff with their digital capabilities (an FE college in Wales and Derby University) – these were very interesting as they were really practical dos and don’ts – particularly the Welsh one.

Then there was a breakout activity and I chose the group on developing an organisational strategy for digital capability – less useful as there was quite a lot of problems rather than solutions but it was interesting to hear issues from different organisations. Did you know that the unions are against online learning in some institutions? They see it as eroding the teaching process and undermining what teachers do.

The findings from the UCISA digital capabilities survey was interesting but I already knew about that from UCISA. I'm not sure that Warwick contributed to the survey this year (or last year in reality). UCISA is a bit unwieldy but they are trying so I think it is worth being/keeping involved with them.

There was then another breakout session where we discussed opportunities and drivers for future developments for supporting institutions with digital capabilities, resources and barriers or challenges. As predicted there were a lot of barriers, a lot of resources needed and less opportunities.

Further information is available here:

https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/digital-capability-community-launch-09-may-2017

The presentations are available here:

https://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/05/18/our-new-community-of-practice-sets-sail/

The JISC will also share a synthesis of the discussion sessions on their building digital capability blog.

You can view reflections from the day on the padlet and view the series of tweets using the #digitalcapability tag in the Storify.

Useful Jisc links and resources mentioned in the meeting:

• Follow the building digital capability project
• Use the JISC guide on developing organisational approaches to digital capability
• See the JISC print briefing
• Follow the JISC building digital capability blog
• Join the JISC community mailing list
• Use the JISC digital capability discovery tool