Student experiences and perceptions of digital literacy skills development: engaging learners by design?

In the current digital environment, it is vital for learners to develop digital literacy skills. The UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (HE) requires graduates to demonstrate digital literacy. Employers consider these skills essential. With the high cost of HE in the UK, learners themselves also expect university courses to demonstrate relevance to the workplace. Nevertheless, some learners may not fully engage in digital literacy skills development, instead concentrating on the subject-specific content of their modules. The Faculty of Health & Social Care (FH&SC) at the UK’s Open University uses different approaches to digital literacy skills development, based on skills resources that are either ‘generic’ (usable by any FH&SC module) or modulespecific. By exploring student experiences of digital literacy skills development, we aim to understand what motivates learners to engage with the skills content of their module. We collected data from online questionnaires and interviews involving learners from three modules and present findings from an analysis of the quantitative questionnaire data, supported by qualitative interview data, where relevant. We look at learner perceptions and engagement in relation to the demographic factors gender, age, previous education, disability and financial status and whether these factors influence individual learner preferences for learning design, such as use of generic resources versus contextualisation of skills activities within the module. We aim to identify good practice in learning design and what demographic factors need to be considered to support individual learners appropriately, and so optimise engagement.