Design and development of Institutional and Instructional Computational Indicators For Assessing HEIs' Digital Readiness to support the Integrated Framework (Deliverable 1.2)

This document reports the process and outcomes of designing and developing a list of institutional and instructional computational indicators for the assessment of Digital Readiness of Higher Education Institutions using a participatory approach (Task 1.1). Task 1.2 builds upon the output of Task 1.1 (“Literature review with regards to state-of-the-art methods and tools for assessing the Digital Readiness of HEIs”). Specifically, we capitalize on the conceptual framework for the assessment of Digital Readiness of HEIs to push the discussion forward and to guide the design of computational indicators. Subsequently, the output of Task 1.2 serves as input for Task 1.3 (“Triangulation of findings”) and drives the design of the survey instrument that Task 1.3 aims to implement and validate. In particular, for Task 1.2 we conducted a series of participatory design workshops with the involvement of academic stakeholders such as HEIs policy makers, government, and teaching staff. The aim of the workshops was to document the stakeholders’ needs relevant to Digital Readiness, to potentially map them to good practices and to collectively design conceptual indicators of Digital Readiness that could be calculated using data that HEIs collect and have available. The workshops were carried out in parallel in three academic institutions and the outputs were synthesized and contextualized using input from Task 1.1. Following an iterative process, we developed a list of data-driven indicators that can provide evidence of Digital Readiness within HEIs in seven dimensions (namely, Leadership and Governance, Policies and Strategies, Teaching and Learning, Training and Support, Content and Curricula, Infrastructure, and Research, Networks and Alliances). We argue that these dimensions reflect the organizational structures of HEIs. Furthermore, we identified six themes of measurable aspects of Digital Readiness that can be found transversely across the aforementioned dimensions. These themes are: Human Resources, Communication, Financing, Digital Usage, Issues and Troubleshooting, Outcomes. Based on our findings, we proposed a refined conceptual framework for the assessment of Digital Readiness in HEIs, based on the initial framework proposed in Task 1.1. Additionally, we delivered a list of 72 data-informed indicators for assessing the Digital Readiness of HEIs. These indicators aim to reflect aspects of Digital Readiness that can be mapped and measured using data sources of modern HEIs. However, their implementation, feasibility and practical value is beyond the scope of this report, but instead tacked in Project Result 2 (“DigiReady+ Open-source Toolkit and Application Programming Interfaces”). Furthermore, these indicators are provided as examples of data-informed measures of Digital Readiness and, therefore this list is neither complete nor exhaustive. We envision that this work contributes towards supporting HEIs in effectively and efficiently self-reflecting upon their digital transformation policies and practices by proposing a computational, evidence-based approach for assessing Digital Readiness on multiple dimensions.