SHOUT4HE Third Newsletter - September 2019 | Page 2

SHOUT4HE THIRD NEWSLETTER | Issue 3
2
Educational Practice – Dimension One
The focus of this dimension of the Framework is on the experience
that teachers create and provide for their students. Ideally, this will
move away from the content, delivery and assessment and will
instead look at developing a greater autonomous responsibility that
is negotiated between the practitioner and learners.
Through ‘empowering’ the learners, the descriptors of the
framework suggest that the teacher’s role progressively moves
towards being a facilitator of the learning experience. Students can
then have a role as partners of their learning and are encouraged to
engage with each other in a collaborative process. There are some
areas where students can take greater control of their learning, such
as: timing of the learning process; more flexibility; and self-control
on how they engage with each other and the content.
Within the upper levels of development of educational practice,
there have been scalable solutions that are found to extend and
sustain teaching innovations. This means that they can become
more manageable for the teacher. The success of these innovations
is dependent on both students and teachers to be able to negotiate
and share responsibility throughout the learning process. This is why
the framework promotes empowerment and facilitating the
learning experience, a concept that is well covered by Nash and
Winstone (2017).
Teacher Role Self-Reflective Prompts
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Do I mostly perceive myself as in control of the
learning experience? If so, have I started to
explore and discuss other possibilities?
Do I use technology to design and deploy
learning designs that move the focus from my
delivery to facilitating and moderating the
students’ experience?
If I use technology to place the focus on the
students’ experience, how does this impact my
identity as a teacher? And, how do I
communicate this to students and the wider
teaching community?
Digital Confidence – Dimension Two
All Aboard
The most suitable framework for us was the All Aboard framework
(http://www.allaboardhe.ie/) developed in Ireland. It is the result
of a project in the context of Higher Education in Irish education. The
framework presents the skills and competences that teachers and
students need to develop in order to make sense of the complexity
that continues to increase in relation to our digital landscape. Similar
to the SHOUT4HE Framework, All Aboard aims for sustainability and
scalability through it being embraced by the ‘user’ community.
The AllAboard project offers a simple, but very accessible tool which
teachers can use to discover their digital confidence profile by
answering a few simple questions. The result is an easily readable,
intuitive profiling result that can serve as a quick tester of levels of
confidence in each of the competencies involved in teaching
innovation through technology.
The level of a teacher’s digital confidence will inevitably
have an impact on the extent to which they integrate
technology into their teaching and learning. There can be
a number of influencing factors on how successful the use
of this technology may be. Their digital confidence will
also have an influence on how meaningful and effective
this practice will be.
When consulting the existing models in the field that
could guide the SHOUT4HE Recognition Framework, it
was important to select a term that was designed around
a positive outlook and language. Therefore, placing an
emphasis on confidence was more suitable than choosing
a term that appears more evaluative or judgmental, such
as ‘competence’.
During the process of creating our framework we carefully
considered comprehensive digital competence
frameworks and evaluation tools, such as the European
Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators and
DigCompEdu. It was important to select a simple and
intuitive model that can engage a wide audience that will
enhance the usability and practicality of our framework.