The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) is committed to supporting the FE workforce to gain the skills needed given the growing importance of digital skills. The ETF has developed initiatives and services to help change the sector’s perception of new technologies and promote the use of EdTech and digital to enhance teaching, learning and assessment.
Our EdTech Strategy, released in Spring 2018, looks at how best the ETF can support the FE sector in harnessing new technologies to maximise learning outcomes – it is a three-year road map for digital technology to ensure excellence in teaching, learning and assessment.
The ETF’s Digital Teaching Professional Framework (DTPF), produced in November 2018 and updated in 2023, is underpinned by the strategy to support the transformation of our country’s technical and vocational education system; with EdTech and Digital performing a crucial role in delivering this step change. The DTPF helps to define what good pedagogy looks like and what digital skills progression means in three stages of personal development.
For more information about our EdTech/ Digital Skills offer, please contact vikki.liogier@etfoundation.co.uk.
The ETF’s focus has been on how technology can help teachers and trainers in their current professional practice, develop their understanding of how to redefine their pedagogic approaches with learning technologies.
To affirm and support teachers, trainers and assessors in using technology, the ETF developed the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform which offered free, bite-size, certified online self-learning training modules mapped to the Digital Teaching Professional Framework (DTPF). In September 2019 the ETF launched a Management Dashboard that enabled employers to capitalise on the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform’s EdTech resources across their organisation and support staff development.
The Department for Education (DfE) introduced a new essential digital skills (EDS) framework and associated national standards. Adults aged 19+ with no or low digital skills were entitled to take EDS qualifications free of charge under the Adult Education Budget from September 2020, in line with existing entitlements for English and maths. DfE commissioned the ETF to deliver a blended EDS CPD programme to prepare teachers, trainers and leaders to deliver the new qualifications based on the standards.
Links to EdTech and Essential Digital Skills training which can contribute to developing the knowledge, skills and understanding required for teaching and learning online.
Content under development
Webinars to Support Remote Working
Spring 2021 EdTech Webinar Series
Spring 2022 Digital Accessibility Series
The review by Dr Tricia Odell for the ETF examined two of the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform communities of practice:
The study assessed the value these communities of practice bring to practitioners and managers, for example by providing dedicated online spaces to network with colleagues. Barriers to engagement are also explored, as well as enablers.
Early in 2018, the ETF commissioned a series of Outstanding Teaching Learning and Assessment (OTLA) Digital projects. The projects, now complete, used action research to evidence ways to spread and embed effective practice in the use of technology to achieve measurable improvements in teaching, learning and/or assessment to improve learner outcomes.