Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Learnhigher is a network for promoting and facilitating the development and dissemination of high quality, peer-reviewed resources for learning development in the higher education sector. We aim to support the development of such resources as well as conduct and disseminate research into the use and effectiveness of learning development strategies and materials.

he UK is a world leader when it comes to student retention – it came top in the latest OECD data (from 2014), with 71% of the country’s students completing their undergraduate courses, in contrast with 49% in the US and just 31% in Australia.

At its new Waterside Campus the University of Northampton is doing away with lecture theatres in favour of more flexible ‘teaching spaces’.

It’s the latest evidence of the university’s developing approach to using digital technology to enhance teaching and learning. Already, Northampton has redesigned two-thirds of its courses to support its ‘active blended learning’ approach and the new teaching spaces are part of a strategy to give students best value from face-to-face time with teachers.

In a new report, Rebooting Learning for the Digital Age, published by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), Jisc's chief executive Paul Feldman, with Sarah Davies and Joel Mullan, calls on university leaders to embrace new technology to meet the challenges faced by the higher education sector.

The Higher Education Policy Institute (www.hepi.ac.uk) is publishing a landmark report, Postgraduate Education in the UK (HEPI Analytical Report 1) by Dr Ginevra House, which has been produced with the kind support of the British Library.

Looking at how the UK postgraduate landscape has changed since the last similar report was published a decade ago, the new report uses previously unpublished data to reveal the state of UK postgraduate education in the years before the Covid-19 crisis struck. Compared to the past, a higher proportion of postgraduates are female, studying full-time and young.

When asking if UK higher education has a ‘retention problem’, the obvious place to start is the known data on lower retention rates for certain groups of students, particularly mature, black and minority ethnic and students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

We’ll get to that later on, but it strikes me that there’s new retention problem on the horizon. Will all this worsen as a result of dropout rates being a core metric in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)?