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Digital Skills Newsletter Issue 15 — February 2022

Alternative formats: if you require this newsletter in an alternative format, please contact our team using the button below or visit our website for an accessible version of this newsletter.

Happy new year from the Digital Skills team and welcome to the winter 2022 issue of our newsletter.

Semester 2 is off to a roaring start and the Digital Skills and Training team continues to support both students and staff as teams across the University experiment with hybrid learning, teaching, research and working. This issue of the newsletter contains exciting details about our Digital Skills Festival 2022, brand new Digital Safety courses, staff training through the new Learning app, and ways you can use LinkedIn Learning to build healthy learning habits.

We hope you enjoyed reading our last issue from November 2021. If you haven't had a chance to browse through it yet, make sure you check it out. You can find links to previous issues of the newsletter online on our website.

Digital Skills Festival: Call for Contributions

Satu Kapiainen, Digital Skills and Training Team Manager

The Digital Skills and Training team was thrilled to be 2021’s joint winner of the Staff Development Forum’s Developing Excellent Practice Award for the Digital Skills Festival.

Call for Digital Skills Festival 2022 Contributors

The attendance numbers and positive feedback from both attendees and presenters have ensured that the Festival will become an annual event and we'll be doing it all again this year from 30th May to 3rd June. We are currently seeking staff and students from a variety of backgrounds and areas to deliver sessions during this week. If you are interested in running a session at the Digital Skills Festival 2022, please contact our team manager Satu Kapiainen.

About the Digital Skills Festival 2021

Held in May 2021, the Digital Skills Festival was the first of its kind at the University of Edinburgh. It was devised as a way to raise the profile of digital skills development opportunities to student and staff communities, encouraging engagement with the various digital skills development resources available within the University. The Festival also provided a great opportunity for the Digital Skills team to experiment and innovate, working together to ensure this event of unprecedented scale would be a success.

The Festival brought together many digital skills development providers from within and outside of the University. The programme included a number of regularly running skills development sessions, as well as a variety of one-off events, exploring lived experience and unusual ways to learn and apply digital skills. This fulfilled a less formal but equally important objective of the Festival: to have fun and celebrate all things digital.

Altogether 57 events were run across the Festival week to 1037 attendees, reaching around 25% of the annual number of attendees on our regular digital skills webinar programme. Feedback from attendees and presenters was overwhelmingly positive. The average overall rating for sessions from Festival attendees was 4.8/5. Participants particularly appreciated the aspect of sharing good practice, especially when it came to topics related to remote or hybrid working and studying.

Feedback from presenters was equally positive. When asked if they would be willing to contribute to the Digital Skills Festival again, 100% of our presenters indicated ‘Yes’. As one contributor commented,

“I thought the range of topics was really impressive and made me think what a great place to work and be involved with [this is]. The Skills Festival was a great advert for not only the Digital Skills Team, but the University as a whole.”

Digital Skills Course Programme for Semester 2

We're now a few weeks into semester 2 here at The University of Edinburgh and the Digital Skills and Training team has put together a comprehensive line-up of new and returning courses to support staff and students at the University. If you're looking to enhance your digital skills this semester, be sure to check out our full programme, available at the link below.

While a lot of our programme is now delivered online via webinar, we are aiming to run some of our courses on campus in semester 2. Be sure to make a note of any classroom-based courses on our programme if you fancy a bit of face to face interaction with our team, and more time and space to try things out on the day.

In addition to returning favourites such as Basic data visualisations, Introduction to reference managers and Subtitling for media creators, we have several new courses on offer, such as a range of Office 365 essentials courses (available for staff and students both on campus and via webinar), Digital research toolkit (webinar), Photoshop introduction (on campus), Open educational resources: Diversifying the curriculum with open education (webinar), and a variety of new Library Bitesize webinars for students.

Book Digital Skills Webinars for Staff with the Learning App

Jenni Houston, Head of Digital Skills and Training

Webinars and how to book

Now that the Learning app is available to staff in People & Money, the Digital Skills team is using it to manage bookings for some of our more staff-focussed webinars. Click the links below to go directly to the course pages for upcoming course bookings. Once on the course page, click the Enroll button at the top right of the screen to book a place:

If you would prefer to browse the learning catalogue for other learning opportunities:

  1. Log in to People & Money
  2. From your People & Money home page, click the Learning tile to open the Learning app.
  3. Type your topics into the search bar at the top of the screen (e.g. data science or Office 365) and press Enter to return suitable learning options.

LinkedIn Learning has been integrated with the Learning app, so courses on this platform will be returned in your results alongside University offerings.

Building up the course catalogue

While we currently have eight digital skills courses available through the Learning app, we and other learning providers will continue to load more webinars, courses and learning resources gradually during this academic year. We aim to have all our staff learning resources available in the Learning app by the end of July 2022. In the interim, you’ll find all our other digital skills courses on Event Booking where they’ve always been. Please bear with us as we work through this transitional period.

Why use the Learning app?

The Learning app will soon become the go-to place for staff training and learning resources from a range of learning providers across the University, with a vision of bringing learning options together in one place rather than using multiple learning platforms as we currently do. From this centralised space you can search for and undertake training and learning and record what you’ve done. Managers can recommend learning to staff in their teams and will have better visibility of their team’s learning goals and progress.

We advise you to start experimenting with the Learning app and building up your record of your staff development. Think about how you can use it now and in the future as a member of staff or as a manager for development planning, reflection, annual development reviews, and try things out. Use the accompanying Skills & Qualifications app, accessible through your People & Money home page, to start building your talent profile by adding your qualifications (e.g. ITIL, CMALT, CITP).

More information on the apps

Find out more about the Learning and Skills & Qualifications apps and watch demo videos on the HR and Finance Transformation Info Hub.

Spotlight On New Digital Safety and Citizenship Courses

Vicki Madden, Digital Safety Support Officer

As we engage with multiple digital technologies during hybrid teaching, learning and working, it’s more important than ever to take ownership of your digital safety and use technology responsibly. To help both staff and students navigate online spaces, the Digital Skills and Training team have developed several new courses, including both a self-paced online course and webinar version of Digital Safety and Citizenship for Staff as well as a new webinar entitled Digital Safety: Lessons from Netflix, open to both staff and students.

Digital Safety and Citizenship for Staff

Aimed at both new and returning staff with limited confidence in their knowledge of digital safety, Digital Safety and Citizenship for Staff is available as both a self-paced online course and a one-hour webinar, bookable through the Learning app in People & Money. This course takes you through steps you can take to keep yourself, and those around you, safe online and is divided into four units:

  • Digital safety: Key threats to look out for, how to protect yourself online and where to go if things go wrong.
  • Digital citizenship: What it is and how to embed this concept into everyday work and teaching.
  • Digital identity: What constitutes your digital footprint and tips on creating a positive digital presence.
  • Digital wellbeing: How to prioritise wellbeing and find balance while engaging with multiple digital technologies.

Book onto the live webinar version of Digital Safety and Citizenship for Staff through the Learning app in People & Money using the button below, or find more details on how to enrol in the self-paced version of the Digital Safety and Citizenship course on the Digital Safety and Citizenship web hub.

Digital Safety: Lessons from Netflix

Digital safety is such an integral part of everyday life that it’s constantly spotlighted in popular culture. This new one-hour webinar takes a look at what lessons we can learn about how to stay safe online and be a good digital citizen from films and television shows readily available on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Through clips from media such as Netflix’s You (2018-present), Chef (2014), Unfriended (2014), Black Mirror (2014-present), Clickbait (2021) and the Shudder original feature Host (2020), we’ll take a deep dive into the importance of curating a positive digital footprint, best practice for social media and how to secure online meetings.

Build a Learning Habit in 2022 with LinkedIn Learning Goals

Andy Todd, Digital Skills Trainer and LinkedIn Learning Service Manager

For many of us, the beginning of a new year provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the previous year and set resolutions for the year ahead. Whether you decide to improve your health and fitness, learn a new hobby, or spend more time with friends and family, creating a habit and being consistent is the key to achieving your goals. When it comes to developing new skills with LinkedIn Learning, the same rules apply.

That’s why LinkedIn Learning, free to use for all University of Edinburgh staff and students, has introduced weekly goals: a quick and easy way to automatically track your time spent viewing videos and courses on the platform. You can choose from a weekly target of 15, 30, 60 or 120 minutes of learning, so no matter how busy you are, there’s an option for everyone. All you need to do is click on ‘Set a goal’ from the homepage and select how many minutes of learning each week you wish to achieve. If you’re short of time, try starting at 15 minutes, gradually increasing over time. If you’re feeling confident from the outset, why not aim for 60 minutes a week?

By setting a weekly learning goal there will be more of an incentive to revisit LinkedIn Learning on a regular basis and, consequently, you’ll quickly find yourself learning more new skills. The best part is that your learning is tracked automatically so you do the watching and LinkedIn Learning will do the counting.

Why not kick-start 2022 and your new weekly learning goal by bagging some minutes with these three fantastic LinkedIn Learning courses?

Find out more about accessing and using LinkedIn Learning at The University of Edinburgh on our dedicated LinkedIn Learning support pages.

Developing Your Data Skills Programme Hits Enrolments Milestone

Tracy Steinberg, Developing Your Data Skills Programme Manager

The six-month Developing Your Data Skills Programme hit a millennial milestone this January when it reached one thousand enrolments following the programme’s inception in 2018. Available for both professional services and academic staff, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students, the programme has proved more popular year on year.

The Developing Your Data Skills programme offers three capability levels to make it suitable for a variety of staff and students irrespective of their prior experience. For each level, content is divided into three topics:

  1. Introduction to Data Skills and Programming (including Excel, R, SQL or Python pathways).
  2. Statistics and Data Analysis.
  3. Presenting Your Data.

Since the start of this year’s programme in September 2021, staff and students from a wide variety of disciplines, and with different levels of data skills, have enrolled in the programme. The flexibility of the programme makes it possible to work around existing work and study commitments.

If you're interested in joining a future cohort, please email the Digital Skills and Training team for more information.

Additional Data Skills Courses Open to All

Check out Event Booking for other data-related events that the Digital Skills and Training Team offer. Current webinars include Introduction to Data Science and the brand-new Data Literacy for Beginners.

Data Literacy for Beginners is a one-hour webinar based on the ten chapters of Darrell Huff’s seminal booklet How to Lie with Statistics (1954). This event updates Huff's concepts, teaching you data literacy: the ability to read, understand, argue with, and make decisions from information. The session helps you spot misleading and exaggerated statistics and alerts you to the potential pitfalls you might encounter while conducting your own research and data visualisations.

Edinburgh Data Science Training for Health and Biosciences (Ed-DaSH) Programme: Call for Participants

Alison Meynert, Senior Research Fellow, MRC Human Genetics Unit

If you are an academic or industry researcher and want to participate in a training programme aimed specifically at people in these roles, with examples drawn from health and bioscence research, The University of Edinburgh's Data Science Training for Health and Biosciences (Ed-DaSH) team are currently seeking volunteers to participate in their programme.

Ed-DaSH is a data science training programme offering skills development training to enable researchers to gain competence and confidence in working with their data. It offers remotely delivered interactive workshops to academic and industry researchers, primarily at graduate student and post-doctoral level. Workshop examples and exercises are drawn from health and bioscience research.

The workshops are based on The Carpentries Model, which emphasizes live coding, frequent feedback, and interactive learning. Please note that registration requires a deposit, which is refunded after attending.

  • Introductory statistics (4 half days)
  • High dimensional statistics (4 half days)
  • FAIR in biological practice (2 days)
  • Conda package management (1 day)
  • Snakemake workflow management system (3 days)
  • Nextflow workflow management system (2 days)

KEEP IN TOUCH

We hope you enjoyed this issue of the Digital Skills Newsletter. Keep an eye out for the next issue due to be released in the spring. If you no longer want to receive the Digital Skills Newsletter, find out how to unsubscribe from our mailing list.

Please follow us on social media using the buttons below to keep informed about our upcoming courses and events, both digital and in-person. For more information on our Digital Skills Framework and training sessions, please visit our website, also linked below.

Credits:

Created with images by Myriams-Fotos - "sparkler lightbulb spray candle" • svetlanabar - "fireworks bright night" • ptra - "workplace imac desktop" • JoshuaWoroniecki - "keyboard computer technology" • JESHOOTS-com - "iphone smartphone apps" • Pexels - "blur chart computer" • Pexels - "coding programming css" The Digital Skills and Training team would also like to thank Viki Galt for help with making our newsletter as accessible as possible.