Stage 3: explore and contextualise

Indicative responsibilities and actions for teams including students, professional, service, academic, curriculum staff and others might include:

• Reviewing the digital capability framework for individuals
• Discussing the role profiles most closely-related to the roles of team members (with those identifying in the same role as well as with mixed roles within the same team)
• Researching subject and professional digital capabilities appropriate to role, subject and destination industries that students are likely to be seeking employment in
• Encouraging individual team members to self-reflect own digital capabilities using the discovery tool and identify personal development options for discussion with line manager or team leader
• Aligning and mapping individual findings from discovery tool activities with other team priorities and development plans (for example: plans to review or refresh curricula, new or updated services etc)
• Individuals aligning professional development review plans with relevant professional frameworks
• Including opportunities to develop digital capabilities and digital graduate attributes in curriculum activities - make these clearly signposted with links to supporting resources
• Collaborating with other team members and other teams on projects designed to improve your curriculum, service or learner experience (for example, if a team were exploring inclusive practice, one option might be to use our accessible content audit framework (Word) to assess, evaluate or ‘user test’ the accessibility of resources)

Tools and resources to help you in stage three include:

• Building digital capabilities: the six elements (pdf) (individual capabilities)
• Appropriate section(s) of the checklist for digital capability (Word)
• Action-focused poster: strategic steps towards organisational digital capability (pdf)
• Jisc NUS roadmap for supporting students to improve their digital experience at university and college (useful for student-facing viewpoint)
• Digital experience insights surveys
• Discovery tool
• Digital capability checklist for curriculum developers
• Feedback from NSS and student satisfaction reports
• Analysis of relevant data from other sources
• Profiles for digital capability as appropriate for team roles - leader (pdf), teacher (HE) (pdf), teacher (FE and skills) (pdf), researcher (pdf), research manager/research professional in higher education, learning technology mapping (pdf), library and information professional (pdf), learner (pdf), professional services staff in education (pdf).
• Digital leaders programme to support personal development
• Resources and guidance for HR teams to embed and support digital capabilities in HR processes
• One-day designing for digital capabilities in the curriculum workshop to help staff to design and deliver a digital curriculum
• Technology for employability toolkit (pdf) with effective practice tips on incorporating technology-for-employability.
• Guide to designing learning and assessment in a digital age explores how digital tools can support curriculum and learning design
• Microsoft's interactive online guide helps educators find free courses and resources tailored to their needs (and mapped to our digital capabilities framework)
• Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award (iDEA) – free bite-sized online challenges designed to develop digital, enterprise and employability skills

Likely outcomes, outputs and enablers that will arise from stage three activities include:

• The establishment of common language, goals and priorities for digital capability
• A collegiate approach to ownership and development of digital capabilities
• Individual teams develop their own construct of digital capability aligned to team, departmental, service and organisational priorities
• Team strengths and weaknesses are identified and mapped against ideal or real-world requirements
• Opportunities are identified to embed digital capabilities in a variety of curricula and student-focused activities
• Digital capabilities development is included in individual and team plans for continuous professional development (CPD)
• Potential collaborative development opportunities that align with or include digital capability targets are identified (for example, collaborative activities with students such as development work arising from use of the Jisc NUS roadmap for supporting students to improve their digital experience at university and college or the digital experience insights student survey
• The establishment of collegiate support mechanisms for the development of digital capabilities