iDEAInspiring 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 pace of change in technology is irrevocably transforming the way we work – within the next 20 years 90% of jobs will have a digital element. We have an evolving digital workplace which urgently needs a digital workforce.
I founded the Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award (iDEA) to help people become economically active in the digital economy.
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.
Digital Marmalade have created an immersive, interactive learning experience which strikes a great balance between being challenging and fun. It’s a great example of an iDEA Bronze badge and has impressed young people and teachers alike
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 the 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 & 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 new citizen badges created by Digital Marmalade for iDEA have fantastic production values and more importantly are gaining brilliant reviews from learners. The Teamwork badge offers a fascinating insight on the roles we play in teams, and how we can collaborate and get the best out of each other.
The E-commerce badge takes a dry, but important subject and injects a real sense of vitality into it by demystifying jargon and making complex processes easy to grasp
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:
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.
It is rare, in our world, to have the chance to work on project that gives on so many levels – diverse in scope, with creative freedom to help deliver a product that will make a huge difference to people’s life. The joint creative relationship that has been core to the success of our work has become the blueprint for any client/supplier relationship moving forward. It was all topped off magically when we were invited to the Palace for the launch and saw the inaugural Bronze winners receive their certificate from the Duke.