A Qualitative Exploration of the DIGCOMP Digital Competence Framework: Attitudes of students, academics and administrative staff in the health faculty of a UK HEI

George Evangelinos,Debbie Holley

doi:10.4108/el.2.6.e1

Abstract

This paper reports upon findings of a series of semi-structured interviews with students, academics and administrative staff from a health care faculty in a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI). Exploring their experiences of mapping to the EU DIGCOMP Digital Competence Framework, a hermeneutic lens enables a more nuanced approach to attitudes towards Digital Competence (DC). One of the eight lifelong learning key-competences required for managers, doctors, nurses and other health-related professionals, DC is crucial to professional development. Defined by 14 themes, the findings express the participants’ experiences, knowledge and level of comprehension of the subject. Our findings indicate students are conflating digital social media skills with their skills for the workplace, resulting in over-confidence; academics raising concerns about work/private life balance offered by the affordances of handheld devices; administrative staff that are far more confident and managing a range of technology’s effectively. The research further reveals that the DIGICOMP framework is applicable as a generic framework for professional practice.

Highlights

Digital competence is considered as the most transferable competence (Balcar et al, 2011) among eight keycompetences for continuous, life-long learning (Figel’, 2007)
The Evangelinos and Holley questionnaire toolkit (Evangelinos and Holley, 2014) comprised of groups of five statements that described in detail each of the competence areas summarised in Table 1 below that emerged from the initial results of the Digital Competence (DIGCOMP) framework (Janssen and Stoyanov, 2012)
For purposes of additional depth and interpretation, the interview themes have been reallocated to the competence areas of the final version of the DIGCOMP framework

Summary

Introduction

Digital competence is considered as the most transferable competence (Balcar et al, 2011) among eight keycompetences for continuous, life-long learning (Figel’, 2007). In 2011 the European Union Directorate-General for Education and Culture commissioned the Digital Competence (DIGCOMP) project. The project documented the current state of knowledge among experts in research, education, training and work. It utilised an iterative Delphi-type survey that recorded the views of experts, validated, refined and shared the results among the expert group, and collected feedback from peer review. In the Health Sector digital competences are a requirement for managers, doctors, nurses and other health-related professionals; digital technologies are increasingly used for office administration as well as for medical diagnostics and interventions. The pervasiveness of digital technology and the resulting demand for digitally-competent users can threaten traditional jobs; people who lack the required digital skills may see their. It can be argued that healthcare trainers have a duty to modernise their curricula and ensure that digital skills become a graduate attribute

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion