Developing digital literacies in undergraduate students: experiences of the SADL project

Digital literacy is a vital skill for the current age.  Work undertaken by the Change Agents’ Network (SEDA, 2014) indicates that students expect digital literacy development from the curriculum but as technology changes at such a rapid rate not all staff are confident or competent to ensure this.  Meanwhile research at LSE (Secker and Bell, 2014) suggested that despite academic staff concerns about the lack of digital literacy skills in undergraduates this has not translated into curriculum redesign.  Student partnership projects such as the Student Ambassadors for Digital Literacy (SADL) allow learners to take part in the conversation of what a curriculum which embeds digital literacy should look like and to develop new ways of applying technology to education. Projects such as SADL indicate that learners have the potential to work in partnership with staff and take responsibility for their own learning experience through peer support and by being involved with developing and supporting the curriculum for future cohorts. The Higher Education Academy define partnership “a relationship where everyone involved is actively engaged in – and stands to benefit from – the process of learning and working together” (HEA, 2014). SADL began as a pilot project in October 2013 working with two academic departments and student ambassadors attended four interactive workshops run across the academic year. The workshops were designed to teach students aspects of digital literacy, but also an opportunity to learn from their peers about their current practices and to encourage them to share ideas with each other. In the second year the project was extended to four academic departments and the number of student ambassadors grew from 20 to 40.  Scaling up the project had a number of implications in terms of the resources required and several new activities were introduced for 2014/5 including: •              Creating 4 Senior Ambassadors positions, who were students from year 1 of the programme who acted as mentors for the current cohort and helped to run workshops for the new group. •              Launching student projects, which involved students working in groups, supervised by a senior ambassador to prepare a presentation for the final SADL celebration event. The group projects covered four topics: improving learning at LSE, improving Moodle, improving learning spaces and peer support. The evaluation and impact study carried out from March – June 2015 was far more detailed in year two of the programme.  In year one, SADL was largely evaluated using a questionnaire circulated to students who participated in the programme (Secker and Karnad, 2014). This year it was important to develop a more robust evaluation methodology and to complement the questionnaire data and to conduct depth interviews with a wider range of stakeholders. The findings from this study will be presented at the conference and suggest the benefits of a peer support network, both for staff and students.  Our approach to evaluating the impact of this programme should also be of interest to the delegates. However, scaling up digital and information literacy interventions is one of the greatest challenges and we will discuss ideas for making the project sustainable with delegates at APT.