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Video: New initiative about Digitally Competent Graduates

Society is in the process of rapid digitalisation, which impacts research, education, and the labour market. Therefore, Aarhus University has decided to make students’ digital competencies a strategic focus area. The initiative is called Digitally Competent Graduates.

Click CC to activate subtitles. To select language: 1) click on the arrow pointing to the right and up, 2) in the left menu click on "Billedtekster", and 3) you can select either Danish or English subtitles at the top of this window. Video: David Kiel and Nina Bang Jensen, CED

Digital competencies are in demand in the labour market. AU’s new initiative Digitally Competent Graduates (Digitalt Kompetente Kandidater) seeks to future-proof the relevance of the programmes and the employability of their graduates. In addition, digitisation facilitates new research areas and methods, and it is crucial for research-integrated programmes that the curriculum follows this development as the fields changes.

Local initiatives driven by the individual programmes

Digital competencies vary from course to course and from programme to programme. For example, an art history student must acquire entirely different digital skills than a mechanical engineering student. Of course, some competencies transcend disciplines. However, fundamentally, it must be run and developed from the inside.

Thus, it has been decided to locally anchor the initiative. This is to ensure that the development is driven by and is relevant to the individual programme.

A broad organisation ensures cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing

There has been a strong desire to share knowledge and inspire across the programmes – in some cases even across faculties. Thus, the efforts are coordinated by the vice-deans. More specifically, they will gather an overview of the different initiatives at their faculty and share these with the Committee on Education.

The CED also supports the efforts with curriculum analyses, which is the first step towards clarifying the levels of digital competencies of a programme.

Expectations for the initiative

The initiative is expected to take place in several phases. The plan of action stipulates that at the end of 2025, an analysis of and a plan for how the programmes’ curricula will become future-proof in relation to relevant digital competencies must be available. The aim is to reach approximately half of AU’s total of around 80 full degree programmes.

At the same time as the analysis work is taking place, there will be programmes that are starting to implement how digital competencies should be embedded in their curriculum. Some study programmes have already started to work on this, which forms the basis for the national project Digital Curriculum, which offers different models for how this can be done.

Read more

You can read more about the digital competence analysis of the curriculum here.