Data-informed assessment of Digital Readiness of Higher Education Institutions (Deliverable 2.1)
Creators: name: Avouris, Nikolaos
name: Kalouptsoglou, Athanasia
name: Daskalaki, Sophia
name: Ortega-Arranz, Alejandro
name: Dimitriadis, Yannis
name: Tsibanis, Konstantinos
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: Abstract

This report is relating to work conducted within Intellectual Outcome 2 (IO2) Implementation of an open-source toolkit and Application Program Interface (API) of the DigiReady+ project. The aim of the project is to define a framework and develop a prototype, in the form of a web tool, to measure digital readiness indicators for higher education institutions based on Institutional and Instructional Data Analytics, with the ultimate objective to contribute into the quality assurance processes of the European Higher Education Institutions. The main goal of IO2 is the design and demonstration of the DigiReady+ toolkit and Application Programming Interface. These tools will support self-reflection and be fed with data from the institutions’ information systems that map to the indicators of the proposed DigiReady+ framework, so that it will provide feedback to the relevant stakeholders. It is important to produce appropriate feedback in a prompt way so as to be able to perform interventions with the goal to sustain and improve the HEI’s digital readiness.

The work in IO2, that is a core work package of the project, is structured in three phases. These three phases involve iterative design and evaluation of the developed tools and APIs. This report is the result of the first iteration of design (months M7 to M12 of the project). It takes as input the deliverable of IO1, e.g. the DigiReady+ framework and aims at defining functional and nonfunctional requirements of the DigiReady toolkit and API to be designed.

The reported work involved all project partners, through a process that is described in the following sections. The process involved first auditing of the DR+ Framework and then a preliminary implementation study of the framework in four HEIs involved in the project. It should be mentioned that in the original project proposal it was foreseen that the three HEIs of the project (UPAT, UVA, UDE) would be involved in this part of the project. However, another University was added, as GUNET was offered to conduct the same study at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). Thus, in the following, four implementation studies are reported.

Interesting outcomes have been produced by the reported study. First, it was discovered that different universities have different structure, information sources, and value in different ways the discussed indicators of the framework, thus making it almost impossible to measure through a common formula digital readiness in all of them. Thus, we need, case by case, to prioritize the indicators and measure them according to the available information sources.

In the following next phases of the project, we should proceed with more specific examples of meaningful indicators for the universities involved and try to normalize the measure of digital readiness, as well as calibrate the measure using independent objective measures of digital readiness. Some of the contributions of the reported here research include a first list of information sources of the HEIs involved, proposals for additional indicators, a corpus of annotations and comments on the existing framework indicators, and proposals for further literature review on digital readiness frameworks and other data-driven approaches.