AELP Brief for Lords’ Debate on 7 September 2017: Digital skills in the United Kingdom Publicly-funded basic digital skills training for adults needs more support
The full report can be downloaded here – https://www.aelp.org.uk/media/1433/aelp-brief-lords-digital-skills-debate.pdf
Extract from the report:
‘We believe it is important for tutors, staff and assessors to have the appropriate digital skills to ensure they can excel in their roles, thus enhancing the learner experience.
The Digital Skills Enhancement Programme is an Education and Training Foundation (ETF) commissioned project. The longer term aims of this project is to ensure:
- Sector teachers have a firm digital skills foundation upon which to build innovative teaching techniques
- Digital technologies are used increasingly effectively in the sector – Existing digital assets (such as VLEs) are better used with more effective content and better integrated as part of teaching and learning
- Increase in sector to sector and collaboration both in digital skills development and more generally
- Managers see the benefits of digital skills enhancement and priorities those in their development planning
The briefing document goes on to state;
……there still are too many bureaucratic barriers and restrictions for training providers to develop and deploy a technological-led approach to learning which inhibits growth. An example of this is the lack of flexibility for providers to develop high quality online learning programmes to form a valuable part of a high quality blended learning programme. Current funding rules are rigid and are relatively unsupportive of enabling providers to develop this route. These kinds of shackles are both perverse and restrictive in what we all ultimately are striving to achieve’.
Qualifi concurs with the authors of the Briefing Paper. As an Awarding Organisation offering primarily Vocationally Related Qualifications at Level 2 through to Level 8 with Top Up Honours Degree and Masters options, Qualifi supports and encourages its approved centres and the wider sector to engage in the use of online and blended learning approaches to the delivery and assessment of learning. Our customers, namely learners are increasingly tech savvy and expect course content to reflect this and to be available 24/7/365. With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, its suggested that the way in which we presently manage, deliver and assess learning will see a paradigm shift in education; the sector needs to be supported to embrace this and ready itself.