St Mary’s is committed to adopting modern technologies that enhance teaching, support learning, and simplify administration of learning and teaching.These strands forms part of a wider plan titled ‘Go Digital’ that will be led by the Chief Information Officer. The emphasis within Go Digital is prioritising the development of our technology around how we work, study and teach, rather than organising how we work, study and teach around the limitations of existing systems. The aim is to ensure that St Mary’s transitions over the next 5 years into modern, innovative, feature rich, technology-enabled organisation.
Our five Digital Transformation goals include the following:
- Enabling student engagement, through transforming the use of digital from as a core enabler of engaging and pedagogically sound online and blended learning.
- Enabling student success, satisfaction, retention and graduate outcomes through strategic use of digital technologies
- Enabling commercial opportunities, through utilising digital approaches to exploit our academic teaching for commercial purposes.
- Enabling student empowerment, through engaging and empowering students to thrive and succeed in their digital learning environment.
- Enabling staff to innovate, through investing in staff, and supporting them in the provision of digital learning.
Digital Transformation theme as part of our Learning and Teaching Strategy
The principles of good teaching have not changed. What has changed is the spectrum of tools now available to lecturers to teach, engage and inspire students. St Mary’s will therefore embrace technology as essential tools to support learning and as a means of providing students with more agency over their studies. With the understanding that digital learning can empower students to receive quality education anytime anywhere, greater and more effective use of digital can only help students harness their own motivation to learn and give them a voice in their educational experiences.
We will ensure that our approach to Digital Transformation continues to be informed by good practice in the educational sector, research into digital HE pedagogies, the experience and expertise of St Mary’s Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team and other key stakeholders/services (such as CTESS), and the experiences and expertise of our academic staff. Our Digital priorities as part of integration with the St Mary's Learning Strategy include:
- Enabling St Mary’s objectives: Being responsive to the evolving needs of the University through adopting a responsive service development approach, shaping service development around institutional priorities of improved staff and student experiences.
- Self-service: Using technology to put information, data and knowledge directly into the hands of the end user (e.g. students or staff), where they are, using whatever device they choose to use (PC, Mac, laptop, tablet, mobile device).
- Humanising of technology: Favouring technology that is more ‘human’ in design, and hence requires less tech skills to master.
- Solutions-based approaches: Designing technology to solve real problems the staff and students frequently struggle with.
- Who, not where: St Mary’s technology, digital services and information should be made available based on who the person is, not where they are.
- Fun: making Technology easy and enjoyable to use.
- Doing more, and quicker: Good technology allows you to do more, and know more, quickly and easily. Good technology allows service staff to answer questions they wouldn’t normally be able to by putting a range of information at their fingertips and resources like Chatbots enable students to get answers to common queries, such as ‘How do I set up my e mail account?’, ‘How do I submit my assignment?’ or ‘When is my next lecture?’ 8. Maximise value through enablement – technology is a major investment and staff and students should be enabled to reap the full value of it. Tailored training and support addresses both the complexity of the tool and end user capability.
A fully copy of the St Mary's Digital Learning Strategy and above goals can be viewed here: Digital Learning Strategy.
A full copy of the St Mary's Learning and Teaching Strategy detailing further information about our five Digital Transformation goals can be viewed here: Learning and Teaching Strategy.
Alternatively, each section is available here: Secton 1, Section 2, Section 3, Section 4 and Section 5