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CUA Digital Capacities Enable Staff Development
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A Professional Services Learning Pathway has been developed for Professional, Managerial and Support Staff (PMSS) in the CUA to help build digital skills and support online and blended learners.
The pathway involves the completion of the Digital Discovery Tool, where learners self-assess their digital capabilities, identify their strengths and opportunities to develop their skills further to enhance their practice of learning. Additional training resources (e.g., Microsoft apps, All Board mini-courses) have been embedded into this pathway to cover digital and soft skills. By offering a variety of learning resources for learners to engage with, this pathway remains open and flexible and encourages learners to revisit the learning platform for further professional development.
Paul Walsh, Assistant Instructional Designer, HE 4.0 Project, IT Sligo
The pathway is easy to navigate and learn in your own time. The learning material is delivered in engaging and interactive formats that keep you engaged. The course helped me to be aware professionally of the great cloud and digital platforms which we are increasingly using to do our work and deliver our services as educational providers.
Emma McDonald, CUA Research Assistant
I really enjoyed doing the Professional Services Badge. It’s so easy to follow, everything is self-explanatory. There’s so much flexibility in the course, such a good bank of mini courses and you can pick and choose what you like. The course also helped me in my research work, imporved my presentation skills and showed me different digital tools and resources I can use.
Aisling Sweeney, PMSS Staff, LYIT
One of the benefits for me was doing the Microsoft Digital Badge courses and the short mini digital courses. Some of the courses also helped me increase my interpersonal communication skills through courses on open university like leadership and management skills and facilitating group discussions.
An Academic Digital Badge has also been developed under the DigitalEd Academic Learning Pathway. The programme helps to build digital capabilities across the new TU. The four steps to completing the pathway are:
1.Completing the Digital Teaching & Learning Online Course from SUNY and GMIT 2.Completing the OpenTeach course by DCU 3.Choosing and completing four Microsoft Education Badges 4.Completing a skill-sharing activity to demonstrate skills acquisition. Academic colleagues also have an opportunity to move on to complete a Level 9, 10 ECTS module certificate in Digital Teaching and Learning.
Trevor Clohessy, GMIT, Academic Digital Champion
Being a digital champion aligns nicely with doing this course as I can share my knowledge with colleagues so that they too can be comfortable teaching online. My experience has been highly positive and the DigitlEd website is a fantastic resource. I can see the project growing more and more as we become a new TU.
