Our new Learning and Teaching Strategy is introducing five new graduate attributes alongside our learning and teaching strategy goals. These attributes are:
- Social Responsibility
- Reflective and resilient lifelong learning
- Problem Solving
- Teamwork and effective communication
- Digital citizenship
We describe Digital Citizenship in terms of graduates who have high degrees of digital capability to actively and responsibly create, communicate and collaborate online.
Digital Capabilities and Digital Citizenship
Our learning and teaching strategy recognises the importance of developing digital capabilities in both our staff and students and this past year has highlighted the significance of developing those digital skills and capabilities that will support us all, as we continue to reflect on the changes in learning and work brought about through the pandemic.
Digital Citizenship can be seen as a collective subset of those digital capabilities that focus on an individual’s relationship with the various digital networks and communities that they interact with.
Student Perceptions of Digital Citizenship
As we start to think about embedding the graduate attributes within our curriculum, it’s important that we take account of our student’s perspective of this graduate attribute, especially considering the changes to learning online and future working practices that are emerging as employers consider their longer-term plans coming out of the pandemic.
The SAP project has been set-up to assess what students consider important in terms of digital citizenship especially as graduates from the University of Worcester. Are the elements of the Jisc Digital Capabilities Framework the right ones to include in describing digital citizenship as a graduate attribute? What digital capabilities do students think are the important ones to reflect here? What do we need to consider within the curriculum and what additional support around that academic focus on digital citizenship should we be considering as an institution?
The SAP project is designed to engage in discussions with students across the Schools and with various student networks to hear their perspectives and ideas around this graduate attribute.
From this we can pull together a mutual understanding of those key digital capabilities we need to be considering within the curriculum and more broadly to support students to develop as they graduate from the university.