Digital Skills Awareness Courses

Digital Skills Awareness for Starting Higher Education (DSASHE) - available now on FutureLearn
Learn about the digital skills needed to successfully transition into higher education in the UK.

Digital Skills Awareness for Starting Higher Education (DSASHE) is a new three-week course offering prospective students the opportunity to learn key digital skills to succeed in Higher Education. It’s particularly relevant after a recent survey from Jisc showed that 87% of students are studying online with a further 12% studying in a hybrid model.

We took our original Moodle course (see below) and completely transformed it for learners across the globe to access.
Course Outline
Week 1: Your Learning Environment
  • Access and accounts 
  • Online learning environments
  • Assignments and assessments 
Week 2: Foundations of Digital Study
  • Study skills tools   
  • Written communications
  • The Internet and searches
  • Working with files 
Week 3: Digital Safety and Wellbeing
  • Safety and security 
  • Social media for learning 
  • Digital wellbeing 
  • Time management

Digital Skills Awareness course for students - available now to install on academic platforms

Our Digital Skills Awareness course, developed for UK higher education (HE) institutions, is available to roll out to students before they start university. This resource  provides new students with advice and guidance to help them have a successful learning experience at university.
Just wish I’d had this when I first started! All relevant info for studying and helping to use the technology at Birkbeck. All in one place!  
​Pilot course participant
Watch our introductory video!
The course outlines the key digital skills students need for their studies and helps them identify the skills they have and the ones they need to acquire or improve. While the course doesn’t focus on teaching practical digital skills, it provides valuable tips from a variety of sources, including university support staff and students, as well as helpful resources and videos.
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Each unit focuses on a particular topic:
  1. General Technologies
    Working with files, Microsoft Office applications, browsers and search engines
  2. Learning Technologies
    Online learning environments, forums, assignments/assessments and video
  3. Access, Sharing and Safety
    Accounts/access, safety, social media and sharing
  4. Getting Organised
    Notetaking, referencing and digital wellbeing

​Based on a Creative Commons licence, this generic Moodle course can be tailored and personalised to fit the local needs of your university once installed on your own Virtual Learning Environment.

To access the demonstration version of the course and find out how to request a copy, please send us a message, ​specifying which course you wish to access.

Designed and developed by:

Sarah Sherman, BLE Director, and Nancy Weitz, Digital Education Specialist, with the advice and guidance of the BLE Advisory Board and a working group of BLE members.

​Recent article about adopting the course:

​McIntyre, K., Weitz, N., Sherman, S. (2023) (Re)developing an online pre-entry course to support student transition into higher education, Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice 11(2). 

Digital Skills Awareness course for teaching staff - available now to install on academic platforms
While we were working on the Digital Skills Awareness course for students, we started to hear about the need for a similar course for incoming teaching staff, who sometimes enter employment without essential digital skills. This led to some market research and the confirmation that there is indeed a need gap.

This course was developed along the same lines: a "blueprint" Moodle course with basic structure and content, which institutions can adopt, adapt and install locally in order to give their new staff a heads-up about what skills they need for their work and - crucially - steer them to where they can acquire and improve these skills.
Each unit focuses on a particular topic:
  1. Policy
    Accessibility, GDPR, IP 
  2. General Technologies​
    Working with files, software and applications, the Internet, safety and security
  3. The Learning Environment
    Online learning environments, interacting with students, video, submitted work, analytics
  4. Pedagogy
    Learning design, teaching and learning in the digital age
We are working on our offer for the digital skills development of academics and think that the course you have put together could really help frame what we are trying to do.
Manchester Metropolitan University
To access the demonstration version of this course and find out how to request a copy, please send us a message specifying which course you wish to access.
The approach we took in developing and offering both of our digital awareness courses was recognised in June 2021, when we were delighted to be awarded the Roger Mills Prize for Innovation in Learning and Teaching.