Aims and Actions

Community Focused

Community-focused

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.


Boundary Challenging

Boundary-challenging

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.


Assessment Orientated

Assessment-oriented

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.


Playful and Experimental

Playful and experimental

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.


Data Fluent

Aim: digital education that understands data, data skills and the data society.

Objectives

  • Taking a research-led approach to education and data.
  • Understanding the possibilities and problems surrounding the datafication of education.
  • Addressing automation with an emphasis on human skills.
  • Engaging creatively and responsibly with learning data.

Short- to medium-term actions

  • Balance development of data skills with other human capacities for wellbeing and employability in a future of automated work, by building cross-university courses to develop student creativity, criticality, problem-solving and collaboration.
  • Establish Edinburgh as a world-leading centre
    for research in interdisciplinary, data-informed education in key areas such as educational data ethics and data-driven policymaking in education.
  • Use our research expertise in data to build an ethical, responsible near future for our teaching and to improve student experience.
  • Create specialist academic development opportunities for staff to fully understand how to analyse and interpret learning and engagement analytics, with an understanding that the datafication of teaching is likely to accelerate and intensify in the coming decades.
  • Embed critical understanding of data ethics and algorithmic accountability within academic development and staff training.
  • Support cross-university programmes of work to provide data skills training for staff and students.
  • Seek mechanisms for embedding students in ‘data work’ via digital apprenticeships, internships and employment experiences.
  • Develop new, engaging ways for students to work creatively with their own learning data to understand issues around its use and ownership.
  • Instigate an academic-led programme to scope ways in which transparent, fair, context-sensitive artificial intelligence applications and services could assist and support human-driven teaching.
  • Establish a cross-institutional, student-led programme of work to develop creative, responsible designs for a ‘smart’ campus.


Post Digital

Aim: education which recognises that technology is fully embedded in daily life.

Objectives

  • Reworking the concept of ‘contact time’ to reflect contemporary practice.
  • Breaking down the boundaries between on and off campus.
  • Rethinking what it means to be ‘here’ at Edinburgh.
  • Offering more flexible ways to be part of the University community.

Short- to medium-term actions

  • Define and embed a re-worked understanding of ‘contact time’ into workload models and course descriptors, which takes account of student mobility, distance education and flexible patterns of study.
  • Continue to invest in programmes of work which open our teaching and community to new cohorts of students online and globally, including technologies for increased telepresence for students working off-campus.
  • Plan for the introduction of technological capacity to teach online and on-campus students together in joint cohorts.
  • Use our capacity and understanding of distance education to open our teaching in new ways to on-campus students, putting student-focused flexibility at the heart of our offer.
  • Ensure all staff have the baseline skills needed for a good student experience of digital education (for example the ability to upload slides, to record lectures, to design effective visuals, to tackle accessibility issues, to provide electronic reading lists).