D4 Strategic Project:Developing Staff Digital Literacies.External Scoping Report

This is the first stage of a TALI Strategic Project on Academic Staff Digital Literacies. The report scopes the grey and peer reviewed literature and provides a landscape review of some of the major developments focussing particularly on approaches supported by the major sector bodies (JISC, HEA and ALT).
The report comes to the following conclusions:
• The term digital capability appears to have growing use by sector bodies (e.g. Jisc and UCISA) replacing digital literacy and digital fluency. We support this because it may be more acceptable to academic staff because it may appear less pejorative. In addition it should be noted that both terms are highly temporally contingent in this is a fast moving area.
• Staff digital literacies are deeply embedded in their local discipline context.
• Whilst there are many projects that focus on students’ digital literacy the literature on staff is much less prevalent.
• Of the few projects that focus on staff digital literacies these tend to lack any empirical base in relation to efficacy or impact.
• Digitally confident practitioners display a range of attributes related to confidence, willingness to explore, resilience to failure and that it is these attributes that characterise them rather than their technical skills.
• Approaches to achieving sustained change in relation to development of digital confident practitioners are more likely to be achieved by focussing on ‘hearts and minds’ where staff have agency and ownership, and feel empowered to make changes rather than audits or appraisals.
• A particular ‘hearts and mind’ approach that has had some use across several HEIs is the course redesign model called ‘Carpe Deum’ (Salmon & Wright 2014).
• In addition Appreciative Inquiry as a model for supporting change processes which has been advocated by Jisc (Gray and Ferrell nd).