The Digital Student

First session this morning was on The Digital Student, a study reviewing students expectations and experience of the digital environment at University.
There's also a parallel study looking at secondary schools. Lots of universities are doing similar reviews locally, and not surprisingly, there's no typical digital student.

All of the findings so far, and some useful resources can be found on the project blog.

The study has looked at the digital environment generally, eg wifi and access to technology, and also the academic digital environment, ie how it's used.

Biggest thing that students want is wifi. Ubiquitous, high quality, fast, wherever they are. It is if you like, the bottom of the pyramid in the hierarchy of needs. It must be there for everything else to work.

For most students, the expectations of they how they might learn with technology are less clear as they have had little experience. So, we need to have a dialogue with them, but cannot just ask them what they need.
Most of them have good digital know how, know how to use devices and services. But, don't know how to use these in academic context.
They are comfortable with personal and and social use of technology, but much less comfortable with institutional systems such as VLEs. So immediately they are presented with something that seems difficult, special, different. There is a sense among the young students that technology will be frictionless to use. Don't have to learn how to use it. But, they have to use complex bits of software in some disciplines.

There's some nice downloadable posters here, about listening to students, and JISC have just released a new Infokit on Digital Literacies which is a very useful resource.




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