I am currently at the UCISA Spotlight on Digital Capabilities event here in Birmingham. I will be live blogging here on elearningstuff.

In this afternoon’s session, Kathryn Wenczek, and Silke Prodinger-Leong talked about online learning and digital capabilities – the theory and the reality.

How do theory and reality for development of digital capabilities compare? What is important when offering a practical online solution to up skill digitally, particularly for fast evolving ICT skills? This session aims to give a brief theoretical insight and show a practical example of how an online learning solution has enabled a more flexible model of training digital capabilities.

The session covered an introduction to digital capabilities including a mention of the Jisc work in this area. They recognised the importance of building capability in ICT Proficiency in order to build on the wider digital capabilities.

There is already on Lynda.com a playlist that covers aspects of the Jisc Digital Capability framework. They feel the framework provides an easy insightful way of describing the many training videos and resources that are on the Lynda.com website.

Talking to other organisations I am aware that there are some universities out there that want to point people who have low capabilities in ICT towards their institutional licence for Lynda.com as well as internal IT training. The site now has a lot of training that is appropriate to other digital capabilities as well as ICT.

The talk moved onto Kathryn Wenczek who discussed how they had rolled out Lynda.com and how staff and learners at Oxford have been using it for a range of activities. What I found interesting was how popular Lynda.com was for just in time training.

I have often thought that the key to effective digital staff development is to provide on demand training or just in time. Often you don’t know you need training in something till the point you need it. The ability to be able to quickly access the appropriate training reduces the frustration that having an issue you can’t solve can have on productivity and workflows. There is also the impact those frustrations can have on take up of digital technologies. If you want staff to be capable in using a range of digital tools and services they often need help and support, but they may not know what support they need until they start using the tool on their own. That’s where a tool like Lynda.com can be very valuable.