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Aim: digital education with the University community at its heart.

Objectives

• Prioritising human contact and relationships.
• Connecting our community of scholarship in new and diverse ways.
• Committing to technology which makes the University accessible and welcoming.

Short- to medium-term actions

• Put the student and staff experience at the centre of educational technology development, decision-making and procurement.
• Invest in technology futures which help us build and diversify communities of learners in new ways, with a particular focus on social technology horizon scanning, staff development and support.
• Provide easily accessible training to staff
  and students focused on social media skills specifically for teaching, and develop support frameworks for those experiencing toxicity, trolling and victimisation online.
• Use technology to build relationships between students and staff based on trust, resisting logics of surveillance and unnecessary monitoring.
• Invest in technologies which offer new ways for remote and off-campus students to be part of the community.
• Accompany these with innovative, cross-discipline community building approaches including peer pairing based on shared interests and geographies.
• Continue to support and further build existing networks for digital education staff to share experience and practice.
• Develop and support digital methods and pathways for building greater engagement with the alumni community.

Aim: digital education that is lifelong, open and transdisciplinary.

Objectives

• Building a culture of lifelong learning.
• Supporting teaching which transcends disciplines.
• Committing to openness. Connecting to the city and region.

Short- to medium-term actions

• Promote and support initiatives which open
  up our education to broad, diverse groups of learners, in the form of high quality, affordable online accredited programmes, open courses, micro-credentialing and continuing professional learning.
• Build capacity for individuals to develop a lifelong relationship with the University regardless of their geographical location or career stage, via open and digital education.
• Make it easy for local people to be part of the university community through informal as well as formal learning.
• Invest to develop transdisciplinary, university-wide courses in key areas, bringing together the best of our online and on-campus teaching.
• Continue to develop codesign methodologies to build student and partner agency in curriculum and learning space design.
• Open all course content to all enrolled students and continue to develop and support existing work in open education.

Aim: digital education with a focus on assessment and feedback.

Objectives

• Diversifying assessment practice.
• Making assessment more engaging for students and academics.
• Supporting new kinds of feedback.

Short- to medium-term actions

• Launch a cross-university, discipline-sensitive programme of work to increase diversity in forms of assessment, including multimodal (video, audio, image, making) and experiential forms (projects, blogs, reflections, reports).
• Build a culture – supported by technology as appropriate – in which students have greater choice over the form of their assessments. Enable risk-taking by, for example, giving students greater choice over which assignments count toward final marks.
• Focus academic development and course design around building exceptional learning experiences, rather than on assessment and performance.
• Promote a culture shift away from exams
  where possible. Use appropriate technology, including AI-supported methods, to enable peer assessment, self assessment and timely formative feedback.
• Critically evaluate and build capacity for high quality automated assessment and feedback appropriate to disciplines, as a way of augmenting and supporting human assessment.
• Create a platform to open up students’ access to each other’s assessed work after submission for peer learning and feedback.

Aim: enabling creative, academic and student-led R&D for digital education.
Objectives

• Confidently opening our teaching practice to technological change.
  Being energetic in designing new, creative ways of teaching digitally.
• Using our academic expertise to develop and scale up new forms of digital education.
• Making access to technical development expertise easier for staff and students.

Short- to medium-term actions

Invest to give academics more time to be creative and risk-taking in their use of digital education.

Provide teaching staff and students with central access to programmers and developers for joint prototyping and trialling of new ways of doing digital education. Support associated pedagogic research through the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme and other channels.

Support staff and students to scale up and spin out digital education ideas and applications.

Extend existing media production facilities and makerspaces into new areas such as biohacking.

Fund a cross-institutional programme of work to scope and develop new virtual and augmented realities for teaching.