Digital Skills Development to Enhance Student Experience with Jan Jobling

This is Dr. Jan Jobling, lecturer in philosophy, and you are listening to the Academy's Developing Practice Podcast. Hello, in this episode we chat with Jan Jobling, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Liverpool about her successful Sir Alistair Pilkington award for her digital inquiry project that sought to impact the student experience through the development of students' digital skills and knowledge. We hope you enjoy. Jan we're really pleased to be speaking to you today. I was trying to think about when I first met you and I think it was at our different institution probably about eight or nine years ago and then we've reconnected at the University of Liverpool which is lovely. We're delighted to hear about the work that you're doing with the digital inquiry project which was recently recognised through the Sir Alistair Pilkington awards but before we hear about that it would be lovely just to hear a little bit of your background and how you've arrived at the position you're in today. Thank you Alex. My disciplinary background is actually quite interdisciplinary working on the border lines of philosophy and literature and politics and ethics. I had a fairly traditional academic career at that said same different institution until I decided to take a career break. I think that was about 2012. I then did quite a lot of freelance and part-time work. A lot of it in education, some of it in web design and that actually proved both fruitful and formative when I got the full-time lectureship in philosophy here at the University of Liverpool because it was bringing with me a whole baggage of different sorts of experiences and skills than I'd had previously. That's great yeah brilliant and I guess that fits in really nicely with the project that you've now been running. I have to say and it's probably my lack of understanding but philosophy and digital skills don't naturally go together so why did you have that interest in both of those fields? I think it's partly because they didn't seem to go so obviously together and yet in the way the world has developed digital skills are so utterly integral. So our students in philosophy were actually pretty accomplished at let's call it standard academic software platforms, word and PowerPoints and using all the virtual learning environment materials and what have you. I thought it would be useful and interesting for them to be able to develop that into other aspects of digital design like websites and podcasts and animations and a just a more diverse range of digital skill which might be useful to them both personally and professionally. Okay great so before we get into your project can you tell us more generally about your role in the department of philosophy at the University of Liverpool? Well my role here is partly lecturer. Partly I lead our curriculum board and at the school level which is several departments together I've also since become the lead for technology enhanced learning. That was actually subsequent to the development of this project that we're talking about now but actually it was quite linked together in terms of the way my career was developing my interesting skills. Thanks John. So Alex has mentioned that you were awarded the Sir Anastepelkitton award and that's what we want to you know discuss with you today. Could you tell us what the project was and why you thought it was necessary to set it up? Okay the project is called the digital inquiry project and basically the idea is that students will pick their own mini research project as one would normally for an academic third year project but then the final output would actually be on a multimedia digital platform of their choice for an audience of their choice. The audience might be in policy makers or in an educational setting or a marketing setting or general information for the public. The platform again could be of their choice. They've largely gone for websites but incorporating other technologies like informatics and animations and vlogs and vlogs and podcasts. As to why I set it up partly it was as a sort of general drive to enhance student digital fluency. This is an institutional driver and also I think it's a sector driver as well. But beyond that I also think it's important for students to be able to do research which isn't necessarily expressed in the traditional 10,000 word dissertation. You know in terms of equality diversity and inclusion that's not necessarily the most effective format for all students but may still actually have something that they want to communicate in terms of independent research. That's really interesting so did the was the reason that the students chose a website predominantly because that they could encompass a load of different types of media into it. For example did you have other students go a bit more out there maybe and use things like I don't know TikTok and such like? I think they ended up with websites because they are so flexible and they can host such a different format of other multimedia types of things. I had some students who started off wanting to use TikTok or Instagram. In the end they decided it was a little limiting. Actually one did do it by Instagram and did it very effectively but it was a very specific and different discipline to communicate philosophy research in such short posts. So yeah I think basically it's the versatility of websites which led to students preferring that as the format. Yeah so you were able to get much more media in there. How did you go about or how did the students go about getting the audience to their content? That was as variable on the student in terms of the kind of project that they were doing. The audience is set up as hypothetical and notional so there's no actual requirement for the students to go out there and find an audience. Some of them did and I recommended that they did because it's another form of review and input onto what they were doing. So I did recommend that they solicit external comment as far as they could to help them produce the website effectively to their target audience. And Jan did you have to upskill yourself? I know if I had to support students with TikTok. I'd be relying on my 16 year old to educate me. I mean how did you what did you do to upskill yourself in terms of supporting students? You had web development expertise but TikTok's quite different isn't it? Oh yes I did and my web development skills were not very high level. I was doing some relatively low level stuff for people. And TikTok when the students said they wanted to use TikTok I'm like okay fine, Google's one's TikTok. So yes there was certainly a lot of upskilling involved on my part. Funnily enough I think that actually ended up being a positive from a pedagogical point of view because it did increase the sense of learning with. So the students knew that I was just like them a philosopher, not a multi-media expert, not a computer scientist. And so I think it made it seem more possible for them as well. That's great. What I really love about this project is that you're obviously responding to an area that you've identified for your students in terms of needing requiring enhancement. You obviously identified somehow that your philosophy students needed to enhance their practice. How did you come to that understanding that this was a key area maybe in terms of future employability that your students needed to have? So it was partly in conversation with students, academic tutes really, in terms of what they were doing. So we have had students who wanted to go on to do radio presenting which included a digital aspect. Students going into all sorts of different careers and having to do presentations. And partly as I said because there's the strong effect for drive. And in terms of employability the evidence is just so clear. All the government reports and what have you in terms of the future of the workforce. There's enormous emphasis on the digital. Now what I found interesting in that was it wasn't specific digital skills. It was digital resilience. They wanted people who were able to learn because technology is changing all the time. Sure. Yeah. So to that extent I wasn't that bothered about which particular technologist my students were learning. It was more that they had the confidence to know that they could learn it themselves and apply it themselves in a structured and supported and setting. Brilliant. And what was the student's response to this? Again it's my bias but I'm assuming students sign up to philosophy because they want to think. And you know it's the whole study of thinking isn't it? Maybe it's not that they were signing up to develop these kind of online platforms. So how did you sell it to the students and how was it received? How did I sell it to them? I suppose employability, breadth of skills, interview skills, also creativity because actually A lot of us. ac mae'n gweithio'r ymwyr i'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn. Mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn. Mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn, ac mae'n gweithio'r cyflwyn. It's quite important to recognise the bravery that takes for those students. This is a third year semester two module, so it's pivotal in their degree. It's a brand new form of assessment. So these students are really taking a bit of a risk in doing something that's so novel for their final assessment. Yes, absolutely, but as you say, then the skills, the future skills that they have in terms of creativity and resilience and flexibility is so important for their employability. So really exciting. That's really interesting, that term you've used around digital resilience. I see that on a day-to-day basis, some people are digital resilience and some people, and I don't think this is about age groups, but some people just aren't. Are they more fearful about picking up a new tool or a new platform? Do you find that students are more negatively digitally resilient? Well, that's an interesting question. There's been quite a lot of research on this, because we older persons tend to assume that younger persons are digital natives. But in fact, there's a lot of research showing that it's only within fairly specific media. So they know really well how to use Instagram and Snapchat and all the social media stuff. But in other respects, it's the research shows there's a tendency for people to overestimate student digital skills and confidence. I mean, one of the things that I was mindful of with this was that nowadays, for your professional career, people are expected to have their own websites, they're expected to have their own LinkedIn. So this kind of module, hopefully equip students with the skills and confidence to be able to host their own websites in that sort of way, to promote their own careers. Yeah, so building that personal brand bit, again, that links really heavily to employ ability, doesn't see. I see a lot of people with their own personal websites these days. Yeah, other own blogs as well, we've got, we've got actually a number of students, not all of who have done this course, who are involved in blogging as a means of communication. So I think this is all part of life nowadays, so I think digital skills are really important, and I think it's really helpful for us to be able to support students in that kind of way. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We're very much leaning into that employability side, aren't we, regardless of, I guess, the topic that they're going through. Some of these sound really interesting. Have you got any examples of maybe some of the final outputs that were produced by the students that you could share with us? Oh, yeah, and they've done a whole range of stuff, all of which they selected themselves. Some have done theory, so one student did the philosophy of dreaming and got some beautiful graphics to go with that. Another student did is can food be art? And again, that really lent itself to some beautiful aesthetic images. But the majority of students have actually tended to go for applied concerns of real public significance. So for example, policy on single use plastics and should there be a tax burden involved, the ethics of fast fashion, veganism and climate change, universal credit. So students have been looking at things of really significant public import. Most recently, one of my students, for example, did something on mandatory vaccination and whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. So they're picking up on stuff that's important in the media and reflecting on it and producing their own reflections on their own websites and blogs. So that's really interesting, some heavy topics there that have been picked up. But you know, at all those heavy topics, the one thing that pricked my attention was can food be art? That would make a fantastic Instagram platform, wouldn't it? Because I probably subscribe to that myself, having been one of those pictures who takes pictures of really nicely well presented food. I guess about this project is that they create something as well that they can then embed in a CV, you know, when they're going to future interviews, the interviewing panel could click on the link to their website and see some of their work. And as you say, you know, students have covered a whole range of different topics. And if that topic is aligned with the field that they want to go into in the future, that's really exciting in terms of having something really tangible that future employers can engage with. Yeah, and what's also really nice to see and what comes out in the feedback is the students sense of pride in what they've done. I found especially when it came to building websites, a lot of students were surprisingly unconfident and were very nervous about the prospect. So rightly, very pleased with their final outputs and what the managed to achieve. Also, in the process, they became surprised because actually with the tools available today, building a website is not that hard, you know, not in a relatively simple one, obviously you can get more and more complicated. They started with Google sites, which is really quite easy to use, looked at WordPress, talked about wicks, so they could, they could go to more complex ones, but we also looked at how you could do something really effective using relatively simple, pretty much plug and play type website building tools. And have you been able to profile any of those outputs in any way? Well, we did have a plan to do so, but then the pandemic hit. So we're returning to this, this coming year in terms of thinking how best to do this. Obviously, we'd need the student permission, particularly for going to go externally to the university, ways in which we could build our own websites to profile theirs, and that couldn't be part of our own kind of departmental information and marketing and so on and so forth. Yeah, I was thinking that that would lend itself to departmental Twitter accounts, I guess, you know, linking to these things, because you would assume that you'd have a wide audience there to be able to tap into and to profile these than the students themselves individually perhaps. Absolutely. And we've done that for some of our dissertation students showcasing their excellent work and it would be really good to do that for the digital project students as well. And being to the wide world, there's a really good stuff that some of them have been doing. I think what's great about this project as well, Jan, is it's massively transferable, isn't it? It's not unique to the discipline of philosophy in any way, you could, you know, use this in a whole range of different disciplines within your faculty and actually across the institution. Have you had any conversations with other colleagues about kind of the transferability of the project? We have in a preliminary source of way and also in discussion with people about how best to expand the project, because I think particularly with COVID and the online pivot, a lot of departments have been very creative in how they use digital tools and the online environment. So I'd see this as part of a bigger aspect of sharing good practice in terms of what colleagues have developed in their own little corners of the faculty and university. I've just had this thought about wouldn't it be great to get a student who is going through through this assessment model and we could, we could help you with this, we could share their work on this platform on this podcast platform if somebody if one of the students did want to use audio and podcasters are means of using their assessment. Oh, what a great idea. Yeah, that's definitely something that we should talk about. Brilliant, so this is really, really interesting, Jan, it would be great to know because obviously this isn't a standard, you know, right, a thousand words written assessment, it's really creative and unusual. Can you tell us a bit about how you've actually assessed the module. Well, that's a good question because this actually was one of the greatest challenges, because as you say, it is, it is not a standard philosophy output where you've got an essay format and you're assessing arguments and so on. I ended up having a form of assessment which emphasizes the quality of the underpinning research, so that the kind of the academic rigor was there. Effectiveness of communication using the media that's been chosen, because it's very difficult to have a standard set of assessment criteria that cover such a diverse range of media. So effective communication as appropriate to media really ended up being the final wave. Mae'r ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn ymwyr. Mae'r ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ymwyr. Ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn yn ffordd oeddwn ymwyr. Yng Nghymru unrhymru yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd yn ffordd a ffynosafir. Llydd, the other thing that really helped me was tapping into institutional support and resources. I think most universities now have some kind of academic support team. We have at Liverpool the Centre for Innovation in Education and colleagues there have been so helpful throughout. So I think learning from others and working with others rather than thinking you need to do it on your own. Really, thanks John, thanks for your time. Thank you. I really enjoyed that conversation with Jan. She's obviously doing some really innovative work around her assessment. She spoke about how, in terms of the quality diversity and inclusion, the traditional model of a written dissertation, for example, isn't always the most effective way to communicate research findings. And so as a result, she's developed a digital inquiry model to provide students with an alternative way to communicate their work. Yeah, it was really interesting that she also found it was digital resilience rather than digital skills that her students required in this digital world that has obviously changed it all the time. And so she developed her project to develop this resilience by supporting students to choose from a range of platforms through which they could present their findings. And if you'd like to take your thinking further, we've added some resources to the website on a specific podcast reading list, which you can access at Liverpool.ac.uk/dhifinacademy/podcast. Please also do let us know what you thought about the episode. You can tweet us @livuniacademy and you can also find us @elernamatt or @Alexandra_Owen on Twitter. And we are really grateful for those who have already taken the time to either rate or review our show in your podcast providers app. But if you haven't done so already, please do review the show as it really will help others find us. Bye for now.