Using the All Aboard National Digital Skills Framework as a diagnostic tool in the Shannon Consortium #t1step ('Take 1 Step') project

Funded by the National Forum’s 2015 Teaching Enhancement Fund, the Take 1 Step (#t1step) project set out to build digital capacity through a focused campaign aimed at staff and students across the three institutions of the... [ view full abstract ]

Funded by the National Forum’s 2015 Teaching Enhancement Fund, the Take 1 Step (#t1step) project set out to build digital capacity through a focused campaign aimed at staff and students across the three institutions of the Shannon Consortium (SC), University of Limerick (UL), Mary Immaculate College (MIC) and Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT). Core to the project was the application of the National Framework for Digital Skills (All Aboard) which is being developed by NUIG, in partnership with UCD, UL and MIC (http://allaboardhe.org/). Rather than target all of the skills on the Framework, the project aimed to identify which skills were most sought by the staff and student body in the three institutions. Additionally, the project aimed to identify the existing skillset which could be shared within the SC. Therefore, the All Aboard framework was used as a basis for a diagnostic tool and a means of identifying and leveraging staff and student digital skills and expertise that could be shared.
As part of the process, the first step was to narrow slightly the range of skills in the diagnostic tool. The second step was to run a campaign to trigger staff and student engagement with the diagnostic process. The results of this step generated an inventory of digital skills (both in terms of needs and capacities) which then formed the basis of the professional development campaign and resource creation and curation that followed. Interestingly, while there was a lot of commonality in terms of which skills were sought across the staff and student cohorts, in the three institutions, there was also a certain degree of variation institutionally. This allowed for a differentiated approach to the provision of training and resources at an institutional level. The process of developing the diagnostic tool will be discussed in this paper as well as the results of the diagnostic. The paper will also reflect on the potential of the All Aboard framework as a tool for guiding differentiated professional development and resource creation and curation.