I plugged these sessions as they rolled out, I am part of national consultation group . Yesterday, the roadshow came to City of Glasgow College and we had a good attendance from both the College and Colleges across Scotland.
I know that following this roadshow that the findings from all of the roadshows will be tested again with the wider community and opened up for comment. I hope everyone is ready to chip in their ideas - there was a lot of good thinking going on yesterday.
I had a sense of dejavu - but then I've been about and working in digital learning for a lot of years now.
Ken Thomson OBE leading event cc Tom Duff City of Glasgow College |
Some things struck me
- Scotland did not do the FELTAG ( Further Education Learning Technology Action Group ) thing, now almost 6 years ago - which has seen a lot of developments in English FE, many of which Scottish Colleges in the know have piggy backed on to.
- In terms of Digital Skills for staff and students - we've watched as both the ETF in England have developed quite advanced frameworks for digital staff skills and the Welsh Government has made digital literacy effectively a core skill for all learners in Wales in FE , Schools and Work Based learning.
- It's too easy not to acknowledge a lot of the support that Jisc gives in this space . It shouldn't be . Perhaps Jisc for all the support it gives FE are still seen as HE and distant . Though close up eduroam and other services are essential to the digital future.
We were asked ....
- What will learning look like in 2030?
- What will learners expect from colleges and how will learning be delivered?
- What will college staff need to deliver this?
- What will the college infrastructure look like to deliver our digital ambitions
- Digital in colleges is not just about learning. What will the college of the future look and feel like?
- What have we missed?
I made a stab at this ... it's same message really I've been pushing for last 10 years. I do hope Scottish Govt can reprofile some resource for this . I hope too SDS and SQA and relevant agencies get around this .. GTCS now for staff skills in FE in Scotland. CDN should be well placed through their networks to deliver messaging and some national development.
A lot is deliverable in large regional colleges .. but national frameworks around staff and student skills and things like sharing of digital learning resources ( I made sure that #openscot ) got a mention. We need high level leadership and resourcing, if it's going to happen sector wide. I do always worry that some of these consultation exercises are about telling a drowning person how to build a boat. The agencies and govt have clear role in sorting national picture out.
There was a lot of good use of feedback technology in the workshop and was pleasing to see http://www.allourideas.org/ used as part of consultation - if you want an ordinal list in a survey great way to do it - driven by Adaptive Comparative Judgement.
Tongue in cheek but perhaps one of our ambitions may be to find out what Scottish FE staff use in terms of social media #digitalambition , if it's Friends Reunited and MSN Messenger -we have a journey to travel - but clearly from engagement around the #digitalambition tag , at the moment perhaps it's not Twitter ?
2 comments:
Well observed! It has been painful to see rUK forging ahead with digital ambition for FE colleges while we have dithered somewhat (not completely as there have been some shining examples of digital intiatives over the piece).
But Education Scotland (and SG) really missed a trick to properly address post-school education in its digital learning and teaching strategy (2016)
We need more champions/ambassadors to step forward and showcase their good practice to raise expectations in their depratment or faculty.
All power to Ken Thomson in this effort to address the issues. If anyone can make this happen - it must be Ken!
Possibly heresy but I think Education Scotland absent on post 16 digital initiatives for most of this century in terms of College landscape but happy to be corrected - and good this is underway.
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