Digital Champions: Building Digital Skills through Partnership

Building digital skills, and confidence in the use of technologies, is crucial to support student success and improve employability. It is also vital, in any higher education institution, for staff and students to feel fully... [ view full abstract ]

Building digital skills, and confidence in the use of technologies, is crucial to support student success and improve employability. It is also vital, in any higher education institution, for staff and students to feel fully comfortable with the range of technologies being used across all the organisations' operations and be aware of the potential for innovation in teaching and learning. Whilst the traditional approach to such ‘up-skilling’ tends to be through the provision of formal taught courses, or training workshops, we have developed, piloted, and evaluated a new scheme which has been co-created by teams of students and support staff.

The Digital Champions project in NUI Galway has run for the past two academic years and are now being ‘mainstreamed’. They provide an excellent case study in the design and delivery of collaborative, flexible, and creative approaches to building confidence and ‘cascading’ knowledge and skills more widely across institutions.     

One of the key successes of the project has been the development of on-campus partnerships with other extra-curricular/outreach staff/student initiatives.   

Evaluation of the project through interviews and focus groups has shown that it has been through these links and in these informal spaces we have found some of the most valuable development of digital skills and confidence.   

This presentation will describe the NUI Galway Digital Champions model. We’ll discuss our approach, how we developed on-campus partnerships and provide an overview of the Digital Champions Toolkit. The toolkit contains advice and guidance on implementing a similar initiative at your institution.