Staff and Student Digital Experiences
A preview relating to next month’s teaching and learning event, a discursive session on Staff and Student Digital Experiences.
Last year there were two surveys published by Jisc, as part of their Digital Experiences Insights work. I wrote about the student survey results in November last year. This post focuses on the results of the staff survey.
Staff results
The survey of teaching staff received 3,485 replies from 26 HE institutions. It covers four themes:
- teaching staff and their digital technology
- organisational infrastructure
- digital teaching
- professional development
Almost half the teaching staff (48%) consider themselves early adopters of digital technologies when they can see a clear benefit. A significant number of staff (15%), more than I expected, said they used assistive technologies (eg screen readers and voice recognition).
University infrastructure
One of the survey’s key messages was that teaching staff want a better quality digital environment. Only 29% agreed that teaching spaces are well designed for digital technology use. I’ll be interested to hear how you feel about LCC’s ‘digital estate’.
A question on the use of the VLE [Moodle or similar] highlighted a contrast with the student experience. On average staff didn’t regularly access the VLE on mobile devices but more students did. Jisc highlighted the implications for staff setting up their VLE spaces of needing to design for mobile. The LCC Moodle Templates are designed to help with this by keeping the site homepages as simple as possible.
Digital teaching
The level of use of digital teaching activities was relatively low in the national survey. The number of staff carrying out these activties ‘weekly or more’ was:
- live classroom polling – 11%
- creating digital learning materials – 24%
- teach in an online classroom (e.g. webinar) – 3%
- giving personalised digital feedback – 20%
The %s who never carry out the above activities were significant.
If you’re interested to know more about these and the student results please come along to the Staff and Student Digital Experiences session on Wednesday 4th March*, 14.00-15.00. Booking Form. There will be a short presentation and plenty of time to discuss the findings and compare them to our own experiences.
*If the UCU strike goes ahead the session may be subject to cancellation / postponement.