Institutional compassion: a co-design approach to developing digital wellbeing [A-034] Home : ALT's Summer Summit 2020

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Thu, Aug 27 2020, 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Authors: David Biggins, Debbie Holley, and Marketa Supa

Room: Bell Seminar Room

Type: Parallel Session (30mins)

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Description

Session Description

This session will offer a very brief theoretical framing of the model, followed by a warm invitation for participants to share their expertise and experiences of digital wellbeing, and to reflect to what extent their own institutions work to co-design digital strategies with their learners. The session aims to be discursive; and participants will be offered the opportunity to contribute to a National Teaching Fellow and ALT-C blogpost sharing the outcomes of the session.

Higher Education Institutional digital strategies are a contested area. On the surface, well-versed narratives of digital strategies, institutional culture change and technical infrastructure to drive innovation are well documented in University public plans; however, the UCISA/JISC (2019) digital leadership in Higher Education report cites 70% of IT leaders expressing concerns about significant barriers to successful digital rollout.. Changing the working practices of academics is of particular note in the literature, and thus models that can frame the changes and offer an evidence base drawing together national and international drivers are essential. Two of these, the European Union (EU) and JISC digital competency frameworks have been revised, and include for the first time some limited considerations around lifelong learning, wellbeing and self-development.

It is timely to share the findings of our three year ‘ontology of digital toolkits’ study. Taking a mixed methods approach, and comprising a survey of TEL leaders (n=36), in-depth interviews and content analysis from seven UK HEIs, our findings identified 4 common themes; the role of the educator in engaging with TEL; the development of TEL toolkits as an institutional norm; a schism where educators are perceived as providers and students as receivers; and finally the gap identified by learners, both staff and students, as they struggle with archaic HEI structures which fail to acknowledge desires for lifelong learning and address digital wellbeing.

Our findings indicate that staff attitudes to Technology Enhanced learning (TEL) remain problematic; students are not yet being fully developed as digital co-creators, and digital wellbeing is an area poorly covered sector wide. Current commercially created resources on digital wellbeing tend to be a series of apps and webpages, (often using images of white, female, middle aged women holding cups of tea, see https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/course/digital-wellbeing
that typically (and paradoxically) suggest ways of digital detox, as if disconnection somehow magically produces ‘digital wellbeing’.

We will encourage reflections on the possibilities going forward to support institutions as they continue to shape their policies toward the digital, offering a Digital Learning Maturity Model (DLMM). This model enables self assessment and benchmarking and encompasses the new dimension of institutional compassion, co-designed with our learners. Our presentation explains the origin and purpose of the DLMM, provides information on how institutions can assess themselves against the five level of maturity and makes the case for institutional compassion as a key element in digital strategies. The presentation will be of interest to those institutions wanting to benchmark their digital strategy and those seeking to provide greater prominence to staff and student wellbeing.

References

Biggins, D., Holley, D. and Zezulkova, M., 2017. Digital Competence and Capability Frameworks in Higher Education: Importance of Life-long Learning, Self-Development and Well-being. EAI Endorsed Transactions on e-Learning, 4 (13).

Digital Wellbeing Educators Promoting the Digital Wellbeing of Students (2019) EU Erasmus Plus available online https://www.digital-wellbeing.eu/ [accessed 10/11/2019]

Jisc. (2017). Developing organisational approaches to digital capability. Retrieved from: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-organisational-approaches-to-digital-capability

Europes Digital progress Report (2018)
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-digital-progress-report

McKenney, S., and Reeves, T., 2012. Conducting Educational Design Research New York: Routledge

Intro to digital wellbeing: learn how to develop and maintain healthy tech habits Free course from Google Digital Garage:
https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/course/digital-wellbeing

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