iDEA
Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award Scheme
The Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award Scheme (iDEA), founded by HRH Duke of York, Prince Andrew, was created to help plug a digital skills gap for people of all ages.
The free iDEA platform offers bite sizes pieces of digital learning (badges) across a huge range of subjects with many of the badges lovingly built by Digital Marmalade.
What is iDEA?
The challenge
With the rise in technology there is a digital gap which is appearing between the haves and the have-nots - a gap that will only grow.
The answer was the foundation of The Duke of York Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award Scheme (iDEA), designed to fill this gap through bite sized badges of learning. The badges are curated to help inspire people to become digital citizens, workers, makers, entrepreneurs, and gamers to enhance their employability; and to empower them to develop vital life skills.
The challenge for DM was to help bring the learning alive and make it both engaging yet accessible, so that people of all skills could get engaged and work towards achieving their Bronze level certificate.
The strategy
Working closely with HRH The Duke of York's iDEA team, Digital Marmalade have created a series of online learning modules, known as 'badges'.
For each skill learned, the learner receives a digital badge containing a number of points that they can pin to their CV. When they have enough points, they are awarded the Bronze, Silver, or Gold Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award.
Each badge requires significant planning and creativity to produce, with a view to making them innovative, educationally significant, and visually rich.
We have over the course of 12 months created a huge variety of badges covering many topics.
Anyone can have a go at the badges - all you have to do is register on iDEA.
Life Hacks
The first badge, which develops skills in constructing algorithms, was focused on an interesting and growing part of technology - automation, smart devices and 'The Internet of Things'.
Using some relatable situations and contexts for a range of people, the badge takes you through a series of steps that develop algorithms (or Life Hacks) to make your life easier.
For example, wouldn't it be great if young people could set up a Life Hack to automatically tell their parents they have left school every day using a formula and the internet of things?
The badge proved to be a great success with users and the client alike, allowing the collaborative, creative relationship to evolve and flourish. Together, with the iDEA team DM then set to work on a further set of very different, but equally immersive badges.
'A day in a life...'' Series
A series of 'A Day in the life of…' badges were next to be delivered.
All designed to give users a taste of the necessary skills associated with a variety of digital roles, such as a games designer, a digital researcher or a web designer.
These badges allowed users to try out real job roles to see what they liked - as well as learning some digital fundamentals.
Topical and practical
Following continued success, DM were commissioned to deliver a further 10 badges on topical and practical subjects such as social media setup, psychology in web design, GDPR, making websites, and advertising.
Two of these badges tackle the disparate, but equally significant, subjects of 'Teamwork' and 'Ecommerce'. These began with a clear story idea from the client, and it was up to Digital Marmalade to work with the team to mould the brief into something graphically and technically exciting for the learners to interact with.
The Ecommerce badge focuses on specific systems that allow businesses to trade and grow online. This includes Electronic Funds Transfer, Electronic Data Interchange, and Supply Chain Management. The Teamwork badge explores the important subjects of team roles and team dynamics by incorporating some behavioural psychology such as the Belbin Test.
The results
Having now created around 20 badges for The Duke of York (find out more) our presence on the iDEA platform is well established.
We are extremely pleased with the results (especially the acclaim from UCAS about our Personal Statement Badge) but, more importantly, so is the client. The concept and platform itself has exceeded all expectations with:
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200,000,000+ badges completed
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25,000+ bronze awards achieved
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3,000+ silver awards achieved
The Award is only set to grow and evolve and become an integral part of many people's digital learning and we are very proud to have played our part.
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