The building digital capabilities team at Jisc are delighted to launch a brand new role profile for educational developers with Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) mapping. As always, the need for and development of the role profile came directly from collaboration with the sector.
What are role profiles?
Our role profiles have been developed with the sector to look at the digital capabilities that a variety of different roles may need to be able to support their role or student journey. The service currently has 10 additional role profiles available including HE Teacher (with Professional Standards Framework mapping), Researcher (mapped against the UK Vitae Framework), HE Student, FE Learner and Learning Technologist (mapped against CMALT criteria). Many institutions take these role profiles as a useful discussion point with staff and students, and some choose to adapt them to create their own bespoke version to support their strategies and initiatives.
How we developed the role profile
On the day
In February this year some of the team met with educational/academic developers from 12 different institutions across the sector who kindly offered to help us develop this new role profile. During this face to face meeting at our Jisc London office we began with introductions and discussions on the need for the role profile and how they saw the role developing.
Although the role profiles highlight digital capabilities, we decided to work with paper, scissors, pens, glue sticks and sticky notes to explore and map what digital skills an educational developer would need to have to support their role. Everyone agreed it was useful to go back to basics, explore some of the existing profiles and add comments and thoughts on the digital capabilities required within the educational developer role.
Working in small teams initially, the groups had some very constructive discussions and shared valuable insights to how their roles as educational and academic developers have changed and what digital capabilities could support this role.
After a fantastic lunch and some networking we regrouped and discussed each teams findings. We explored the SEDA mapping and how this could be aligned against the role profile. It was evident how much the role of an educational developer had changed since the pandemic and the heavy reliance of digital consideration when supporting staff and students.
Towards the close of the day, the group nominated Professor Helen King from Bath Spa University and John Knight higher education consultant and academic developer (both of whom kindly volunteered) to continue to lead on the collaborative work after our meeting.
After the workshop
In the following months, the BDC team met with Helen and John to form a draft role profile based on the work from that day. Using the power of online collaborative working, the group continued to add thoughts and comments to the document. Finally, once we had a final working version, Helen added the SEDA mapping to the role profile and we had a brand new role profile ready to go to production.
Acknowledgements
We are incredibly grateful for the cross sector collaboration on this piece of work. The team would like to extend a very special thank you to both Helen and John for leading on this project to bring an additional role profile to our digital capabilities service. We would also like to thank Sarah Knight, head of learning and teaching transformation at Jisc for bringing the idea of this new profile to the team, and of course our content curation manager Louise Price and creative designer Gavin Rain, for all of their hard work on making the role profile come to life.
The new educational developer role profile is now available to view and use on our service website. As always, if you would like to find out more on the building digital capability service please email help@jisc.ac.uk with ‘BDC’ in the subject title and we would be delighted to meet with you.
