The Professional Literacy Suite (PLS) is the first suite of online digital and professional literacy modules created at a course wide level at Deakin University. Digital and professional literacy and employability skills were identified as educational skill gaps as part of the course renewal process for Deakin’s largest undergraduate course, the Bachelor of Commerce (BCom). In response to this, a multi-disciplinary project team was created, the Digital and Professional Literacy team, drawing upon complementary academic and professional expertise across the course leadership and unit teams, the Faculty of Business and Law Learning Innovations team and the Library team. Tasked with creating a systematic, sustainable solution to enable reuse by other courses, we built a suite of embedded digital literacy modules. Strategically designed and scaffolded across the course, the modules ensure students develop digital literacy skills, professional insight and support employability. Delivered wholly online, the PLS provides a consistent and equitable experience for all students during their studies ensuring equal access to both cloud and campus students.
Last year our work on the Professional Literacy Suite won the ASCILITE 2018 Innovation Award, ‘awarded in recognition of outstanding innovation in the development of a major professional development initiative which promotes the exemplary and research informed use of technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education’.
As part of this award, we were invited to write a blog post, host a webinar and give a presentation at the ASCILITE conference this year. Our webinar ‘A multidisciplinary approach to embedding digital literacy across the curricula’ is running on Monday July 29th, 12-1pm, you can register here. We also maintain a blog site with further information.
