I attended Connect More 2025 hosted by Jisc and whilst there were many takeaways, the presentation from Oxford University regarding building student digital capabilities at scale was a clear standout.

This fantastic session started with a key message that expectation is outpacing enablement.  Our students move with ease between platforms and they expect their digital experience to be connected, intuitive and useful.  Essentially, they are outcome focussed and expect clarity and support as standard.  In the midst of all this, the pace of change is accelerating with AI at the forefront as it reshapes what digital fluency means on a weekly basis.  The vast majority of skills have shorter shelf lives than most curricula and students are somehow managing broken digital identities across social, work and learning platforms.

The University of Oxford highlighted the importance of stewardship rather than owning everything – helping the whole landscape feel more connected for all users.  They started by introducing a single portal to bring everything digital skills related together under one umbrella.  They reviewed their support for essential tools alongside emerging technologies.

They enhanced their delivery model so that it was flexible and could fit around workloads and also make it easier to plug into things like continuing professional development, onboarding and peer learning.

They also adopted more sector-based practice through closer partnerships with groups like Jisc with some personalization of their tool so that users at Oxford could start to engage with the total offer in a way that worked for them.  The key point Oxford makes in this presentation is that it’s never a finished system but everyone should be looking in a shared direction and this really hit home for me with the programmes that I lead at the University of Edinburgh.

It is vital that we all work from the same map!  Take steps to better connect with our audiences and students should come first.

They’ve started building an app due for launch in October 2025 where students can easily identify how they’d like to develop and then carry that through into building the skills and confidence that they’ve identified.  The beauty of this app is that there’s no login barriers, no buried content and no endless searching around for content.  It’s a simple low barrier experience that gets them where they need to be fast.  This is especially useful for the wider university community where hundreds of colleges and departments can if they so wish direct students to a structured personalised offer that’s already setup and works!

At the heart of this simple and clear user journey is a tube map layout and structure.

It’s intuitive, non-threatening and helps students get their bearings quickly – I love this!  There are 6 different colours which are the 6 biggest challenges that students told Oxford they faced and these have been connected to clear actionable pathways.  Each line links to curated support and resources structured around individual hubs which is what the students are actually trying to achieve.

The example given in the presentation was around working with data.  If a student says they’ve never had to work with data before and now they really do they can simply follow the purple digital essentials line and that will lead them to a station with relevant practical resources to aid their development.  They get a lightweight structured path that is completely accessible – wonderful!

The other beauty of this map is that departments and colleges can adapt the map locally if they need to.  They can take the base resources, add stations, swap them out and change the resources to suit.

The end journey is linking this map to the self-assessment tool which then directs students to a resource finder.  Whilst this resource is primarily aimed at students, I can see how this approach might be applied to other audiences at our institution too.

The tube map especially, gives the whole institution a way into this conversation. It creates a shared model that’s easy for teams like careers, HR and libraries to pick up and respond to. It sets a standard of expectation that everybody’s working towards and enables a conversation to take place that wasn’t possible before.

I learned so much from this presentation that I’m looking forward to implementing with my own practice that will hopefully have a positive impact on the whole university community.

Connect More 2025 Reflection – Building Digital Capabilities / Digital Skills, Design and Training by is licensed under a