Introduction
Welcome
Whilst many academics assume current higher education students are digital natives, research suggests that current students have significant gaps in their digital proficiency and may not be prepared for the constantly evolving digital workplace. As an academic yourself, you may have observed the high variability in your own student’s digital capabilities and are seeking a new approach and resources to better support student development of digital capabilities in your own institute. The “Embedding Student Digital Capabilities in Higher Education” Pressbook has been written to support academics to achieve this goal.
This Pressbook guides academics through curriculum design thinking to strengthen student development in digital capabilities specific to their discipline-context. Working examples from the Digital Health Futures project team at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia are used to stimulate ideas and provide valuable resources to get you started no matter the discipline or geographic location.
What is the Digital Health Futures project?
The QUT Digital Health Futures project is a direct response to the recent explosion in artificial intelligence and unprecedented acceleration in the rate of digitalisation, disrupting all fields of health and medical science. The recognition of a gap between students’ current digital capabilities and those that are increasingly critical for successful careers as future health professionals provided the impetus for the team to rethink how we currently support student development of digital capabilities in higher education.
The Digital Health Futures project team partners with academics to embed digital capability development into mandatory units of study to support student development and foster their growth into digitally fluent leaders and innovators. This is achieved by:
- Embedding digital capability development across all programs and units of study, and providing students with access to resources, training and support to build and strengthen their digital fluency.
- Embedding authentic learning and assessment tasks that promote digitally-enriched student engagement, using a diverse range of technologies and employing a scaffolded whole-of-course approach.
By partnering with academics, the Digital Health Futures team aims to embed opportunities for students to develop their digital capabilities to ensure all students develop the essential employability skills authentic to their industry, and evidenced by assessment.
How is the Digital Health Futures approach different?
Common approaches to student digital capability development have the following risks:
- misalignment between the stated importance and expectations of digital capabilities in existing industry contexts and the time spent developing and verifying these capabilities in curriculum;
- traditional approaches that are piecemeal, repetitive, bolt-on or absent altogether rather than embedded, systematic or scaffolded;
- reliance on student self-service models that risks disengagement and missed opportunities to develop critical digital capabilities needed in the workplace.
