e-Maturity

Below is my Prezi on 'e-Maturity' from this year's Leading a Digital School Conference (#iwbdig11). I first came across the term e-Maturity in Becta's Harnessing Technology Review 2009. e-Maturity is defined by Becta as the capacity of a college or learning institution to make strategic and effective use of technology to improve educational outcomes with the emphasis being on the school rather than individual teacher efficacy.

Becta made reference to a survey tool that was used to measure a school's e-Maturity. After a lot of digging around I unearthed this in the Measuring e-maturity in the FE sector Technical report, 2008 (made even harder to find after Becta was disbanded). The survey questions used were grouped under 6 umbrellas:

1. Strategy and Policy
2. Professional Development
3. Online Learning
4. Integration of eLearning
5. Use in Assessment
6. Impact of ICT and eLearning
   

In a simple manner I copied, pasted and edited 41 of these questions for my schools' context in a Google Doc Form. An exemplar survey that readers can copy and edit for their own purpose can be found here.

A recommended exercise is to issue an e-Maturity survey to a staff team and present back the findings so that they take ownership of the profiles and identify where the strengths and weaknesses lie. Following on from this it is recommended that the school executive completes the survey and checks the similarities and differences in profiles with the staff perceptions then discusses the comparison at executive level and acts accordingly.

Becta assigned schools one of four e-Maturity labels:

• e-enabled
• enthusiastic
• ambivalent
• late adopters

(Personally I find the term 'ambivalent' unhelpful). In order to provide a score and hence self-rating for our schools I developed a simple algorithm to calculate e-Maturity based on the survey responses.

The scores and ratings are arbitrary and unimportant outside of a school community. However, this is a tool for school self-evaluation and to help inform strategic planning within individual schools. Hopefully some of you will find it of use. At the very least it is a good exercise in modelling the use of Google Doc Forms as a survey tool to a staff team.

e-Maturity on Prezi