With the move to the new Web Publishing Platform and the advent of the new University Design System, we’re taking the opportunity to gather some feedback on our flagship Effective Digital Content course, to ensure we offer the best possible training for staff working with digital content. 

Our Effective Digital Content course

For many University staff, our Effective Digital Content course is their first experience of learning about preparing online content. Formerly called ‘Writing for the Web’, the course has evolved over the years to align with staff needs, to include updated examples and materials and to ensure relevance to the changing contexts and circumstances of the University.

Details of Effective Digital Content course

Read more about the previous development of our training in Lizzie Cass-Maran’s blog: Effective Digital Content: 13 years of Writing for the Web

Since the pandemic, the course has been available as a self-enrol course within Learn, frequently completed alongside EdWeb training. With the move to online, we have had less real-time feedback from those completing it. We can probe the analytics within Learn to provide us with quantitative data to indicate the number of staff who have completed the course, but apart from a handful of comments, we know little of staff experiences of the course. Did it include the information they needed? Did it answer their questions? Was it relevant to the work they do? To continue evolving  our course and shaping our wider plans for training , we needed more concrete feedback about how effectively the course was preparing University staff for web publishing and content creation tasks.

Developing a survey

The move to the new Web Publishing Platform and the advent of the new University Design System, presented the ideal opportunity to review our effective digital content training offering, with a view to making it as staff-centred as it possibly can be. To work towards this goal, we wanted to understand staff expectations of web training, learn about their past experiences and understand barriers to being able to create and manage web content effectively.

Having gained approval for an intern to help us with this work, we recruited Ayshalini (Aysha) Rajahsuresh as our Digital Content Training Materials Intern.

Aysha’s initial task was to complete the Effective Digital Content Training course herself, and to review feedback from her fellow student interns who had also completed the course as part of their induction activities. She then set about developing a survey to circulate within the University to gather feedback on the different aspects of the course.

Complete the survey

The survey contains 25 questions and should take up to 30 minutes to complete. We will be collecting responses over a four-week period to ensure as many people as possible have time to contribute their views. If you would prefer to provide your views on the course in a different way, you can contact us at website.support@ed.ac.uk

Complete the Effective Digital Content survey (opens in MS Forms)