Library Subject Guides
Digital literacies need to be continuously assessed, progressed, and supported, across the students' learning experience. Capacities acquired iteratively, progressively, and through practice of authentic tasks, are better retained than those gained one-off, in isolation, through instruction.
You don't need to radically change your approach to teaching and learner support to foster the development of students' digital capabilities. You should begin by considering how your current approaches to teaching and learning could enhance students' digital capabilities with the introduction of relevant digital tools. This way you can intertwine the use of digital forms for core tasks progressively across the programme, encouraging students to adopt digital practices and critically evaluate them.
On this page we'll provide useful ideas and resources for integrating digital capabilities into academic programmes.
Consider the application of digital technology in terms of the course as a whole — not just individual modules or year-groups — so as to maximise the range of literacies developed and to ensure progression across the curriculum.
Progressively incorporate digital learning development opportunities at all stages, considering and building upon the different needs and abilities of your students. Use a breadth of approaches to maximise opportunities for learning.
Reflection makes explicit the digital skills development taking place, and allows students to discover and articulate different aspects of their own learning process and engagement, acknowledging strengths, recognising areas where development is needed (perhaps contrary to prior assumptions they may have had about their digital abilities), and setting appropriate goals accordingly.
Actively engage students with innovative, activity-led approaches that allow students not only to practice and develop digital skills, but also to make progress as independent learners and critical thinkers.
Provide students with the opportunity to develop digital skills that are not only relevant to their academic progress, but also to any future they may have in careers beyond the University.
Make space in the curriculum for students to develop their skills appropriately — for instance, it may be more beneficial to teach a student the skills to find information for themselves, rather than simply giving them the information.
Digital tools like Google Workspace can help collaboration — not just for student groupwork, but also for staff collaboration across the department and the wider University.
You may find it useful to consider the following research findings/theoretical perspectives when thinking about how you can effectively facilitate the development of digital literacy capabilities:
These resources are designed to help teaching and support staff involved in curriculum design and review to think about current practice and to develop opportunities to embed relevant digital literacy capabilities into academic programmes.
As a useful starting point you may want to take a look at the following information, which provides context on the development of students digital capabilities — this is a generic example of how the base model could be used to define the digital capabilities of learners and is meant to be adapted to suit specific settings:
Subject discipline digital practices and capabilities should be considered as part of the curriculum design process. On leaving higher education, graduates will need more than a good level of digital literacy: they will need a repertoire of specialist skills and awareness of digital developments suited to their choice of career and their subject specialism. You may find the following exercise useful when considering what digital capabilities your students may need:
A useful exercise (developed by Jisc), that can be completed individually or as a programme team, to consider what subject specific and general digital skills successful graduates will have:
Draw and label a digitally literate graduate in your subject area or profession.
Consider their:
Once you have identified the digital capabilities a graduate from you discipline needs you can incorporate them, where appropriate, into your programme-level learning outcomes.
Embedding digital capability into the curriculum aligns them with the educational aspirations of the programme and helps students to make sense of the tasks and technologies (JISC, 2014). You may find the following resources a useful source of inspiration when you create tasks to develop students' digital capabilities across the curriculum:
Different types of assessment require students to display digital literacy capabilities. An essay can incorporate information literacies and digital creation literacies, but varying the format of assessment across the curriculum can be a way for students to develop even more digital skills. For instance, the production of a presentation requires media literacy capabilities, while the production of a Google Site requires ICT Skills and understanding of digital identity.
The JISC Building Digital Capabilities Learner Profile can be useful for identifying digital literacy skills and understandings linked to assessment criteria:
Enabling digital capabilities can also be identified and linked to the assessment criteria and intended learning outcomes. The identification of enabling skills can help to identify opportunities to embed digital literacy and identify areas of progression across the curriculum. The example below shows some of the enabling skills associated with 'outstanding use of source material':
There's more examples of this approach on our case studies page.