This two-day event took place in the International Convention Centre in Birmingham in March and explored ‘the power of digital’. The programme comprised four strands.

The Digital Strategy Strand emphasised how important it is to have a clear digital strategy at an institutional level (something that is under development here in CTE). Topics covered in this strand included:

• Key strategies for engaging learners and motivating managers
• What institutions need to consider as part of their digital strategy
• Widening access to education locally and internationally
• Security and how data can support making digital strategies work

The Student Digital Experience Strand focussed on the JISC Student Digital Experience Tracker and how institutions are using the data collected from it to make better, targeted use of their resources to support the development of their students’ digital capabilities.

The Next-Generation learning Environments Strand looked at topics such as:

• Taking advantage of emerging technologies to improve the student experience
• Harnessing technology to improve the campus, classroom and curriculum through capturing data
• Developing ethics and codes of practice
• How learning resource services and libraries are being adapted and managed in a changing environment

The fourth and final strand Teaching and Learning Excellence in a Digital Age looked at how technology can be used to enable teaching and to improve student outcomes.

Keynote speakers included the very engaging Shakira Martin who is the NUS president and someone who comes from an FE background rather than an HE background and Rose Luckin who is Professor of Learner Centred Design at the UCL Knowledge Lab.

Workshop sessions included:

100 education strategies later: what we learned about how universities think digital strategy - and how they could do better. This session was of particular interest to me as I am currently writing the CTE TEL strategy and this session gave me some valuable pointers about what to include (and what to avoid!)

Students' responses on learning analytic dashboards by Liz Bennett and Sue Folley from the University of Huddersfield looking at what personalised data students found useful during their learning journey.