Digital wellbeing to institutional compassion: a co-created journey?

Abstract

he conference theme of ‘shared experience, different perspectives’ very much reflects the huge variety of digital approaches to wellbeing taken by Higher Education Institutions as they sought to support students and staff during the pandemic. However, underlying the images of ‘happy technology users’ smiling as they use their devices featured on university websites, the reality for many students was depicted in the NUS student survey (2020). The survey reported 20% of students faced challenges accessing online study resources, with those from poorer backgrounds, BAME, care leavers, and those with disabilities particularly impacted. And despite all the happy, smiling websites pointing to online help, only 18% of students sought help through digital wellbeing tools. Our presentation picks up from this point – why is it so many students fail to access the materials supplied? Our response has been to draw upon literature and findings from a three-year research project (Holley and Biggins 2020), where we suggest that wellbeing approaches needs to be framed as co-created activities embedded within institutional policies; and that our universities can build towards being genuine ‘compassionate organisations’. We define digital wellbeing as the impact of technologies and digital services on people’s mental, physical and emotional Health (Jisc 2020). We posit a concept of maturity, the notion that processes and policies have different levels of at which they operate (Cooke-Davies 2004). Our findings suggest a continuum of five levels for institutions to work though, from ‘top down’ policy drivers to ‘ground-up’ co-created approaches. This focus is similar to that seen in the Jisc digital capability framework (Beetham 2015) but with greater emphasis given to wellbeing and the perspective from a maturity lens. Do these new notions of the institution start to move towards an ‘Education 4.0’ future (EY and FCCI 2018)? Drawing upon our recent pilot (Biggins and Holley 2021) we will present a case study from one UK HEI, reporting on the results of a student survey of wellbeing (n=600). This case study is used to test the framework to determine that institution’s level of maturity and to investigate how the model can be used to further wellbeing provision for staff and students.