Professional Updating
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Professional updating is something that everyone whose role impacts upon the learner experience needs to undertake in order to deliver an inclusive learning experience. Learners, technologies, techniques and knowledge all change and develop over time. In order to deliver an effective and inclusive service it is important to continually review, reflect and update your practice.
There are a variety of frameworks for professional updating in education, both formal and informal, relating to every role. Much of the material produced and gathered by JISC Techdis is aimed at informal professional updating – i.e. the "just-in-time" techniques, tools and solutions needed to resolve specific accessibility issues and the general up-skilling that staff undertake under their own direction on an ad-hoc basis.
However, there is now a recognition that formal accreditation of the process is sometimes required. To encourage staff to look further at the JISC Techdis materials in this way, the ITQ in Accessible IT Practice may prove a useful tool for staff engaging in informal professional updating or to provide a route to formal accreditation if so desired.
Particular resources from JISC Techdis that might be helpful in identifying your own professional updating needs are the Online Accessibility Self Evaluation Service (OASES) and the Staff Packs.
The OASES resource provides the opportunity for people whose job role falls into one of the categories listed:
- Senior managers;
- Library/information professionals;
- Staff developers and learning technologists;
- IT/network managers;
- Marketing staff;
- Learning support and disability support managers
to complete a questionnaire that assesses their current practice in a variety of areas, and then provides them with an anonymised summary of all results for that role group to date, to enable the participants to benchmark their own responses against those of the wider sector.
The JISC Techdis Staff Packs provide a ‘pick and go’ suite of staff development materials covering key accessibility and inclusion themes. They are suitable as a development sessions and can be delivered by non experts or can be used as self-development materials and include:
- Background materials
- Related icebreaker activity
- PowerPoint presentations with full speaker notes
- Printable activity sheets
- Background information sheets where relevant.
