When we launched the Academic and Digital Campus Plans together a year ago, we did so to underscore the important connection between our academic mission and technology. Digital Fluency is one of the major intersections of the work of these two plans.
This work is focused on what is necessary for the success of our people – both learners, graduates, and employees. Many individuals within our community were consulted on how to articulate digital fluency for Humber, and we also conducted environmental scans of 234 Canadian and 35 U.S. institutions, along with global institutions, to identify best practices.
Following this, a Digital Fluency Framework was developed and 163 digital initiatives and resources already available across Humber were catalogued to help support institutional capacity building and professional development.
One of the important findings of our work so far is that developing or strengthening digital fluency should be done as a collaborative community. To achieve success, it needs to be a shared process in which individuals each seek to learn and bring back insights to their team to help move Humber forward.
For learners, there is the perception that since many of them grew up with technology, they know how to use the digital tools they encounter in their academic journey at Humber. The reality is there is wide diversity of familiarity with digital tools for study and work and that we need a strategic approach to helping learners develop the digital skills they need for success. Digital fluency skills enable individuals to confidently balance and navigate the use of digital tools, manage data and content, and communicate in digital and online professional communities.
Our ways of teaching, learning and working are evolving, and we need to ensure that our learners and employees have the resilience to adapt as technology changes as well as the ability to engage in the digital workplace effectively and ethically.
Next Steps
- We will transform the Digital Fluency Framework into a dynamic website to support the visibility of the framework and provide a hub for the resources that will support the development of digital fluency across the college.
- We will integrate the Digital Fluency Framework into the talent management practices within People(s) and Culture for application across Humber.
- We are preparing to test a new action plan that will support teams to assess and develop digital fluency capacity and training needs. Once the action plan is completed, we will begin testing it within designated teams.
In the coming days and weeks, we will continue sharing the progress made in year one of the Academic and Digital Campus Plans.
| Gina Antonacci Senior Vice-President, Academic |
Scott Briggs Vice-President, Digital Innovation and CIO |
