How can technology help?

Digital technologies are essential for maintaining the flow of communication between apprentices, tutors and workplace mentors.

The table below explores this three-way relationship a little further and looks at the type of interactions that commonly occur.

Jamie Harle, University of Greenwich, has demonstrated the range of digital technologies and resources that degree apprenticeships may be expected to use by taking the results of our 2017 student tracker survey for Adult ,Community and Skills Provider institutions and mapping this to technologies commonly in use in HEIs.

This table illustrates the high degree of digital literacy likely to be needed by a higher or degree apprenticeship student. In some tasks, students can work independently but in others they require approaches to collaborate with each other or to engage with a tutor or workplace mentor. ‘As the student has an 80% time commitment to the workplace, and may wish to study outside of term, this places greater emphasis on students to be self-reliant in installing, learning to use and, then, independently troubleshooting issues with their use of such technologies.’ Jamie Harle, University of Greenwich

• The learning types in the last column of the table relate to Diana Laurillard’s conversational model of learning. Find out more about this in the resources section.

Conversational framework Find out more about Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework for learning in this short video.