Learning and Teaching in Action Volume 11 Issue 1 2015
Special Issue: Open Facilitator Stories
Open Facilitator Stories 2014 by CELT & OKF is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Front cover Image Peter McEwan Peter McEwan completed a Btec Foundation Diploma in Art and Design in 2014, and is currently in the second year of the Degree in Illustration with Animation at Manchester Metropolitan University. Peter prefers to sketch from life and favour pen drawn illustrations enhanced with coloured pencils, Photoshop and occasional watercolour. Upon graduation he aims to work as a freelance illustrator. WEBSITE: petermcewan.wordpress.com INSTAGRAM: petermcewanillustration
Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching Manchester Metropolitan University Published May 2015 Contents
Page Article
5 Editorial Charles Neame
6 Open Facilitator Stories: What is this all about? The 2014 Collection Carol Yeager and Chrissi Nerantzi
Bring Your Own Devices for Learning
12 Friday night’s alright for open online learning Alex Spiers
17 The importance of social glue in open facilitation, a personal exploration Chrissi Nerantzi
27 My Reflections of being a Facilitator on the BYOD4L course Chris Rowell
33 Facilitating the unknown David Hopkins
37 A facilitator’s journey: a game of two halves… Neil Withnell
44 My role as a facilitator: The value of reflection from multiple personal perspectives Sue Beckingham
52 Facilitating and Residing in a Digital World Sam Illingworth
59 Facilitating an Open Online Learning Course Catherine Hack
67 Moving from personal to institutional engagement - my BYOD4L timeline Sheila MacNeill
74 Facilitation as a personal engagement in an open space Andrew Middleton
81 Tweetchat experience - what’s in a ‘140 character tweet’ Kathrine Jensen
Assessment in HE
87 Facilitating an online course for the first time Anne Jones
90 Assessment in Higher Education Online Open Course Rod Cullen
99 Rachel’s reflections Dr Rachel Forsyth
Introduction to Open Education
102 Reflections on the Peer to Peer University (P2PU) ‘Intro to Openness’ Course Lenandlar Singh
108 Facilitator’s Reflections on P2PU ‘Intro to Openness’ Course Peter Reed
113 Facilitating the Community as Curriculum in Open Education Carol Yeager
Other
119 My story as an open facilitator Mina Sotiriou
124 Refining Flexible, Bite-Sized Open Education for Work Based Learners Colin Gray
134 Open Facilitators Project
Editorial
This special issue of Learning & Teaching in Action brings together the reflections of a number of MMU colleagues with others, mainly from around the UK, but some from much further afield. Reading these personal accounts of teaching practitioners getting to grips with new experiences in professional development I am prompted to consider how readily we need to be able to switch between expert and novice roles.
These stories bring with them many examples of innovation: for many of us, participating in open and online learning is a new experience in itself; for most of the authors in this issue, facilitating that kind of course was particularly new; the technology we use is constantly changing, and it also is always new to someone, if not to all. ‘Dealing with what is new’ in higher education teaching is the one thing that is no longer new! In some shape or form we have to do it almost daily, either as teachers (or facilitators) or as students ourselves. The days when we could achieve a position of professional mastery and expertise and work from that constant for the rest of our professional days is, for many of us, now something of a myth. The idea of ‘teaching a canon’ of universally accepted disciplinary knowledge, which can only change with the measured consensus of a disciplinary peer group and which is taught according to the signature pedagogies of our discipline, is no longer as unshakeable as it once seemed. To deal with this, we have to get used to switching from teacher mode to learner mode, sometimes almost instantaneously.
This changing educational landscape is set out here by Chrissi Nerantzi and Carol Yeager, who have edited this edition. In doing so, they have not only brought together a series of stories with which we can identify according to our own experiences of open and online learning, but they are simultaneously inviting us all to share our own experiences too. The phrase ‘an ever-changing world’ can be irritating when used loosely by writers to excuse an insufficiently robust analysis of change; in the area of open and online learning and the technologies that support it, the world really does seem to be ‘ever-changing’ – for the time being at least. Sharing our own experiences of that change is to be encouraged, and I hope this collection will encourage colleagues everywhere to do so.
Charles Neame Editor Open Facilitator Stories: What is this all about?
The 2014 Collection Carol Yeager and Chrissi Nerantzi
Introduction to the collection
Learning has always been a magic lamp. Now, however, it’s open for all-- and there's not much chance of putting the genie back. Publicly and freely available digital educational offers, including open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP), are penetrating higher education and professional learning more generally, and change and transform how we learn and develop as individuals, professionals, and a collective. Professor Martin Weller (2014) talks about mainstreamed open educational practices. While this might not be the reality everywhere at this point, there is no way back -- or is there? The social web, digital technologies and their ease of use, with their relative low cost and availability, are changing everything around us, including who we are, how we live, how we interact, create, share, how we learn, and the ways in which we develop. The landscape of engagement, learning, and development opportunities is much more diverse, distributed, and connected than ever before. Our appetite to create and share with a wider audience has increased (Gauntlett, 2011): We now share resources, information, ideas, and we co-create artifacts and knowledge in vast networks and communities that stretch around the globe through personal connections and collaborations that we would probably never make otherwise. How this all happens fascinates us.
Higher education today is in a period of constant change. Many of the assumptions we have accepted about teaching and learning are now being challenged. For example, we used to connect what we called formal learning with a location, such as a school, college, or university, and a pre-defined timetable of activities. Now, formal learning is acknowledged as also occurring in virtual spaces, across distributed communities and networks often without any set location; it happens across multiple institutions and multiple platforms while
often formal and informal learning and development are blending (Conole, 2013). The parameters of place, time, and pace are much more flexible today when we think about creating new opportunities for growth. However, learning and developing in these complex and interconnected spaces and communities is not always easy for all. We think it requires scaffolding and support. There is often an assumption that peer support is the answer to it all and that the educator or facilitator is no longer needed. Not true. Facilitators play a vital role in bringing people together to form learning communities. This applies to classroom learning and development as well as blended, online, and open educational offers. We admit that facilitation can be challenging, but it is also very rewarding.
We were keen to explore the stories of those individuals who have experienced open facilitation, facilitator presence and input in openly licensed courses. This would help us better understand and recognise specific features of effective facilitation in open learning communities. The literature suggests that there is a gap in research linked to facilitation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) while increasingly there is recognition that the model of the “absent facilitator” doesn’t work for all and new models of facilitator support are needed for open educational offers (Lane, 2009; McAuley, 2010; Kop & Carroll, 2011; Bayne & Ross, 2014; Weller, 2014). What can we learn from facilitation and facilitators in open educational courses that sit outside MOOCS that might also be useful in other open educational offers?
Author, educator, and activist P.J. Palmer (2007) noted that teachers need to speak out more about teaching. The same applies to facilitators about their work. Perhaps speaking about facilitation in open settings is easier, and more natural even, as there are no doors or walls. The classroom is open, and learning and facilitation form a shared and transparent process with learners, co-facilitators, if there are any, and silent or invisible observers. This apparent transparency makes us wonder about the impact open facilitation could potentially have on face-to-face teaching and the observation of teaching in these settings. As facilitators, we learn through sharing observations, reflections, and experiences. We see this part of enhancing our own practice and being a reflective practitioner. This is both enjoyable and fascinating, and it helps us gather new information and insights about our practices as we develop and refine pedagogical approaches that we are using to help us grow as practitioners. We see the same
experiences through a kaleidoscope of perspectives. The collaboration and ability to recognize and adapt new modalities is vital as the learning landscape is in a state of constant flux and growth.
There are as many approaches to learning as there are learning facilitators, and each has an individual perspective on the learning environment and how to implement the tools and ideas that inspire and sustain learning best. The learning process has no real beginning or end; it is a lifelong and lifewide process. The same could be said of professional development.
In some countries, the focus is still on individual learning and demonstrating what one knows. Elsewhere, collaborative learning is being recognized as not only important but an essential component of learning and development. As we examine the learning that goes beyond the self, we form new networks and build upon prior pedagogies, creating an extended community of learners with ever- expanding repositories of connected and specialized information as well as platforms for interaction and collaboration. These connections enable us to learn and develop further, which is vitally important.
We are both open educators, have been involved in and led open courses, create and use OERs in our practice. We are passionate about creating stimulating development opportunities that motivate learners, boost confidence and help us all grow as individuals and the collective. However, we need to acknowledge that the new open practices, while they do create opportunities, can also bring challenges with them, for all of us learners, designers and facilitators. We were keen to explore these from the perspective of the open facilitator and felt that a collection of authentic stories that capture their experiences and reflections would be valuable for others, gain a deeper insight and also generate a resource that would be useful who are embarking for the first time to become an open facilitator but also researchers who are interested in related inquiry.
The open facilitator stories presented here were all collected in 2014. The majority of them are from colleagues with whom the editors had worked in specific openly licensed courses; many of the initiatives were collaborative and cross-institutional, and, therefore, this present collection is focused around specific courses. The stories are arranged in three main clusters linked to specific open initiatives they relate to: Bring your Own Devices for Learning, Assessment in
Higher Education and Introduction to Open Education. The remaining contributions follow and conclude this collection.
The stories are all personal accounts, written in the style of the author, and they vary in length and structure. They have been written using a collaborative folder in Google Drive and openly peer reviewed by the editors and contributors, so the review has been transparent and social. The stories illuminate aspects of the experience that stood out for the facilitators, and that in itself provides a valuable source of information while highlighting specific themes linked to the open facilitator experience. This will be of value also to the wider community. Colleagues who are engaged in similar and other types of open educational practices and MOOCs for example, might find this collection useful for their practice. We hope that the collection will encourage further research into this important aspect of open educational practice and help us to identify drivers, opportunities and challenges but also conditions that can enhance the experience further and design more effective facilitation models that will enable and empower learners.
In collaboration, the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching and the Open Knowledge Foundation have initiated the Open Facilitator Project. Within this, there is now a special place for open facilitators’ experiences and reflections to be shared. This project will enable the wider community to contribute to the collection. Stories from facilitators in similar and different open offers, such as MOOCs for example are all very welcome as we feel bringing diverse voices and practices together will help us gain a deeper insight into the lived facilitator experience.
In this endeavour we would like to pose a few questions that we hope will encourage others to add their thoughts and reflections. How can these ideas help us develop engaging learning experiences for new generations of learners and facilitators? And how can we create new models for learning and facilitation based on these ideas?
We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as much as we did.
Carol Yeager and Chrissi Nerantzi
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all open facilitators who shared their stories generously with us for this collection and agreed to make them available as open data: Dr George Veletsianos and Dr Charles Neame for all his efforts to help get this collection published; Marieke Guy and Dr Javiera Atenas from the Open Knowledge Foundation for her interest and commitment to the project; John Griffin, open learning enthusiast, for his editing assistance; and MMU student Peter McEwan for designing the beautiful cover image and making it available under a creative commons licence for wider resource and repurposing.
References
Bayne, S. and Ross, J. (2014). The pedagogy of the Massive Open Online Course: the UK view. York: Higher Education Academy, available at https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/elt/the_pedagogy_of_ the_MOOC_UK_view [accessed 3 April 2015]
Conole, G. (2013). Designing for learning in an Open World. London: Springer.
Gauntlett, D. (2011). Making is connecting. The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web2.0. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kop, R. and Carroll, F (2011). Cloud Computing and Creativity: Learning on a Massive Open Online Course. In European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, available at http://www.eurodl.org/?p=special&sp=articles&article=457 [accessed 7 April 2015]
Lane, A. (2009). The Impact of Openness on Bridging Educational Digital Divides. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 10, No. 5, available at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/637 [accessed 30 March 2015]
McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G. and Cormier, D. (2010). Massive Open Online Courses. Digital ways of knowing and learning. Available at http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf [accessed 2 April 2015]
Palmer, P. J. (2007). The Courage to Teach. Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco (CA): Jossey-Bass.
Weller, M. (2014). The Battle for Open. How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: ubiquity press.
Carol Yeager has been a mentor, lecturer, course developer and learning facilitator for more than 20 years with SUNY-Empire State College. During that time she has been primarily involved in innovative online, open and international education. She co- developed SUNY's first initiative in cMOOCs with a course in Creativity and Multicultural Communication. She followed with open online courses in math and metaliteracy. Innovation, communication and critical thinking on a global scale have been Carol’s primary foci. She has travelled extensively for educational purposes as well as for personal and educational advancement of visual and deliberate creativity concepts.
Chrissi Nerantzi is a Principal Lecturer in Academic CPD at Manchester Metropolitan University. She developed and now leads the openly licensed FLEX CPD scheme, teaches on the Postgraduate Certificate and the MA in Academic Practice and supports individuals and teams at MMU to enhance teaching practices. She has participated and initiated open cross-institutional education initiatives using freely available social and mobile media with colleagues from other institutions (examples include @openfdol, @byod4l, @lthechat, #creativeHE) and carries out research in the area of open education with a special focus on collaboration in cross- institutional and cross-cultural settings. Twitter: @chrissinerantzi
Open Education Working Group [http://education.okfn.org/] has been established by Open Knowledge [https://okfn.org/] to bring together people and groups interested in open education. Its goal is to initiate global cross-sector and cross-domain activity that encompasses the various facets of open education. The working group has collaboratively written an Open Education Handbook [http://education.okfn.org/handbook/], a living web document targeting educational practitioners and the education community at large.
Friday night’s alright for open online learning Alex Spiers
My name is Alex Spiers and I’m an Educational Technologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. I support academic staff in making the most out of using technology to enhance their teaching and learning. Part of my role is developing and supporting the use of the institutional VLE, (formerly Blackboard, now Brightspace), as well as encouraging the practice of using social media and mobile technologies in supporting teaching and learning. I’ve been involved with MELSIG (Media Enhanced Learning SIG) since the early days of PPPSIG (Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes SIG) and have organised, facilitated and presented at meetings across the country.
What did I do and what attracted me to it?
Passionate people inspire and motivate me to take action. So when Chrissi Nerantzi first asked me to get involved in the first BYOD4L open course, how could I refuse? It tends to be quite difficult not to get swept up in her enthusiasm and energy, so saying no really wasn’t an option. I volunteered to co-deliver the final tweetchat, alongside Chrissi, on the Friday evening based on the theme of creativity. A tweetchat is something I’d previously only witnessed happening in my twitter timeline, although I have used twitter to converse around hashtags before, though mainly at conferences.
As someone whose job it is to explore, understand and apply technologies to support learning, I recognise very clearly the challenges this fast paced mobile technological environment deals me, never mind those with a passing interest and minimal skills. Mobile technologies provide a near constant flow of change: new apps, new devices, upgraded operating systems, new services appearing on an almost monthly basis. Alongside this, practice in using these tools needs to be refined and long term implications have to be understood. Then, just as you were getting the hang of it, it all changes again. Very challenging. This is why I passionately believe that we, as a community of learners, teachers and practitioners, need
to make use of the communication opportunities afforded us, such as Twitter, to connect with others and share our knowledge to help us through this period of accelerated change. Very few of us are able (or willing?) to keep up with of the manifold changes in technology and higher education. However, by being part of the BYOD4L experience we can shoulder some of that burden. Having an engaged network of practitioners and learners who are willing to help, support and share their knowledge is really invaluable, if not essential.
My Facilitation experience
My job role requires me to facilitate a range of different staff development opportunities that are, for the most part, fairly traditional special interest forums, small group teaching and short CPD activities, which are all face-to face in the main. Over the past few years, I’ve become more interested in distance learning and openness, alongside the surging growth in MOOCs. Together with this I’ve been forcing myself to break out of my comfort zone and deliver CPD sessions using webinar software (Blackboard Collaborate) – To my mind I see facilitating a tweetchat as part of this move towards open digital facilitation, as I have never formally been involved in the delivery of an open course before.
Practical considerations for preparing to facilitate a tweetchat are essential. Here are some of my basic choices. Firstly, not attempting to keep up with or communicate in all the social media spaces proved to be, in hindsight, a very wise move. It was challenging enough keeping up with the Twitter chatter, never mind the Facebook and Google Plus groups. Technical set up for the night was important. I was fortunate to be doing the final tweetchat and so was able to learn from my colleagues’ hard work during the hour, as well as the post-chat debrief in the Facebook facilitators’ group. Many spoke of the need for multiple devices to help manage the maelstrom of the tweets, so I used my laptop running tweet deck alongside my iPad mini as my main communication but with my Samsung S3 phone switched on for notifications to ensure I was responsive to participants using the hashtag.
What was I hoping to learn?
Before I began the BYOD4L course, I thought it would be useful to capture some of my thoughts about the course and what I hoped to gain from this new experience. Below is what I wrote on Sunday 26th January 2014.
Here several reasons why I think being involved in this project is a good thing:
1. Learn from participants and colleagues about enhancing teaching and learning using mobile devices. 2. I've run the LJMU Mobile Device Support Forum for the past two years and a recent event was all about BYOD. So I hope to share a little of my experience 3. I've never facilitated a social media chat space, only webinars via Collaborate, so this will take me into uncharted territory in terms of my skills. 4. We can't know all the apps, all the devices and all the operating systems - sharing our knowledge is the key way to navigate this fast moving environment 5. I get the opportunity to learn with a great team in a new and exciting way 6. No doubt I'll find new apps and new ways to use my devices to support me and others. 7. It will force me to blog (I'm not the most prolific), but may also force me to record my thoughts in more creative ways. Beware! 8. I might earn my first badge!
Let’s respond to each of the reasons why BYOD4L open course was a ‘good thing’ and reflect on how it has helped me in my current post.
1. Learned a great deal over the week about the practicality of facilitating tweetchats, organising an open course, working outside my comfort zone and my normal hours of employment, but also was heartened by everyone involved engagement and immersion with the experience, helped me get the most out of this opportunity. 2. & 6. I hope that my knowledge and experience came across well enough for those involved in the tweetchats, because I know I was exposed to some great apps, difficult questions, creative ideas and approaches that have found their way into my day-to-day work.
3. It certainly took me into uncharted territory and has made clearer the range of ways to extract maximum value out the practice of a tweetchat. Using Storify in this context to archive the chat was really illuminating. 4. Sue Beckingham and her Edshelf helped with this, as did recommendations from participants – in particular Postachio – a blogging platform for Evernote. 5. The closest experience I’ve had to this is tweeting at a very busy conference or event. The rush of connections is exhilarating and the depth of connection is palpable and persists long beyond the event’s end. This feeling makes you want to revisit the tweetchats again and again to understand and extract more from them. Thanks goodness for Storify. 6. Yes, in the short term, being participant and facilitator forced me to reflect and write a post after each tweetchat. I found creating an audio recording of my rough ideas the morning after the night’s tweetchat was a good basis for writing up a reflective post. 7. I earned LOTS of badges.
What didn’t work for me?
As you would expect with a new, experimental adventure there were elements that needed refinement. Firstly, the timing of the chats did prove challenging. I have a young family and the 8pm start did have an impact on my fatherly duties - thankfully I have an understanding and supportive partner. I expect these concerns may be familiar to many of the team. The one element that did and didn’t work for me was the use of Facebook. This is a social space for me and my family, close friends and colleagues to interact and keep updated with each other. I chose not to use this space for work at all. So I did hesitate when I was invited to join the BYOD4L Facilitators’ group. I have an app on my phone and iPad with notifications always on. What impact would this have in my Facebook use? Working in “hidden” groups is really effective for a number of reasons. Firstly, the wall post notification feature draws you into this space to find out what is going on, but also being able to see who has looked at the post. Unlike email, questions or comments posted in the group tended to be seen, liked and responded to very quickly and at all hours! That said, all of these positive reasons I’ve mentioned could
also be considered drawbacks. The constant ‘buzz’ of new posts and the invasion of work time into personal time and space is something that I need to consider if I were to do this again. Perhaps I wouldn’t add my Facebook account as a means of communication, rather keep it to direct messages within Twitter. On reflection, this seems more appropriate to the way I use social media in my workplace.
What value for you personally
Learning from this energetic group of people about what can be achieved by strength of will and community mindedness, is one of the major take-homes for me. Working in collaboration with this skilled group of people, in a supportive, non-competitive environment focussing on the benefits of the learner and the learning, was extremely enlightening. The real time nature of the open course also allowed for there to be changes in delivery and to respond to new ideas that surfaced through the week. Finally, leading the online chats enabled me to use a familiar tool (Twitter) in an innovative way, allowing me to be exposed to new approaches, as well as extending my practical skills (and network!) in open online facilitation. Yes, Friday night was alright….
The importance of social glue in open facilitation, a personal exploration
Chrissi Nerantzi
Contextualising
I am an Academic Developer at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) where I work with colleagues who teach or support learning to enhance their practice. Some call us ‘change agents” (Elton, 1995; Roche, 2003) while others recognise that the ‘expert approach’ might be less effective than a partnership model as described in Debowski (2014) where developers are co-learners. This is also how I see myself, as a co-learner. My approach is experimental and playful and I wouldn’t encourage my colleagues to do anything that I don’t do myself. My own playfulness has led me to adventurous explorations, disasters but also eureka moments and celebrations. I am who I am thanks to my mistakes, failures and successes. I am currently a PhD student (and I am proud to call myself a student!) investigating the collaborative aspects of the learner experience in open courses in the area of professional development of teachers in HE. This contribution enables me to focus for a bit on the other side, the open facilitator experience and bring the two together.
For some years I have been involved in developing and organising open academic development interventions. Higher Education is becoming more open (European Commission, 2013; Conole, 2013) and the boundaries of formal and informal learning are no longer clearly defined (Conole, 2013). But learning more generally, is also becoming more collaborative and personalised (Redecker et al, 2011). There are opportunities for universities to consider implementing more open and lifewide curricula (Jackson, 2013) to take full advantage of these.
A while back, I organised an open pilot (Nerantzi, 2011b) where I brought together students who were studying towards a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from different institutions to explore Assessment and Feedback in distributed and
supported Problem-Based Learning groups (this was part of an MSc dissertation). Later, I developed the open course Flexible, Distance and Online Learning (FDOL) which became a module on a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice. It was offered as an informal collaboration with an institution in Sweden and was credit bearing for some participants. Initially FDOL was offered over 12 weeks and the last iteration was 6 weeks. The second iteration, FDOL132, became a case study for my PhD research. In total FDOL was offered three (3) times (Nerantzi, 2014) from 2013 to 2014. In early 2014 Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L) followed, and was offered over 5 days. BYOD4L was also linked to a learning and teaching event as well as a book publication (Nerantzi & Beckingham, 2014). More recently, in March 2014, a further idea turned into a project. This became an Open Education Week 2014 initiative. I had suggested ‘hijacking’ an existing stand-alone open course available at p2pu (see Intro to Openness in Education developed by David Wiley) and add facilitation and support to help a colleague who was launching a brand new OER network in the North West of England. Through my engagement in the above projects and research carried out linked to the facilitator experience (Nerantzi, 2011a; Nerantzi, 2011b; Nerantzi & Withnell, forthcoming), there is evidence that suggests that the role of the facilitator is really important not just in traditional courses. A supportive facilitator can make a real difference to the learner experience in open courses as well and is something that open learners seem to really value. The relationships among facilitators also seem to influence how a course flows and therefore special attention needs to be paid to this aspect from the outset. My own experience has shown that creating a climate of mutual trust, caring and support will be motivational for facilitators.
So far, I have had the opportunity to facilitate learning in several open educational settings. Every course has been different and all have been valuable learning experiences informing my practice as an open educator.
Something like a project introduction
The story I will share here is linked to my experience as a facilitator with BYOD4L. Warning, this is a ‘feel good’ story.
I guess it is obvious already that my BYOD4L facilitator experience was positive. Let me tell you, it was extremely positive and I am excited about sharing my story with you. Looking back at the experience offers me the opportunity to relive that experience while at the same time I will be searching for ways to analyse the experience and identify key features that made it so special personally and collectively. This exploration into my lived experience will also be useful for others who are embarking on open collaborative projects. Ok, let’s start.
BYOD4L was developed by Sue Beckingham and me for the Media- Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group (MELSIG) led by Andrew Middleton. I have known Andrew for some years through the MELSIG and we have found in each other a critical friend and collaborator. Sue came to my life through social media and SEDA and she had a warmth that I really appreciated. I found it really easy to connect and work with her. All three of us are open spirits and love experimenting with ideas and making things happen. The overall aim of the BYOD4L project was to provide opportunities for teachers and students to come together and learn about using their smart tools for teaching and development in a supportive and inquiry-based community. We wanted this to enable bite-size and pick 'n' mix autonomous and collaborative, hands-on experimental and experiential learning. We wanted learners to adopt an inquiry-based approach to their practice. We wanted to provide opportunities for dissemination of their academic innovations through a forthcoming event linked to Smart Learning and a related book publication.
Too good to be true?
It was natural for the course developers to join the facilitators’ team and engage together with our volunteer co-facilitators and co- learners in BYOD4L. This togetherness is really at the heart of what I experienced. I knew Sue before we embarked on this joint adventure but we had never really worked that closely together. We gelled instantly and were open, supportive of each other and totally committed to the project. I never wanted to do this on my own; in practice all my open experiments have been collaborative ones, but it was important for me to find a person with mutual understanding as well as a mutual trust. Jackson’s words echo in my mind about “the wonderful effects and emotional support of creative collaboration by
people who believe in and trust each other” (Jackson, 2013, 17). I felt that our professional relationship and the closeness we felt despite the fact that we didn't really know each other that well was a significant factor. These elements also influenced the relationship we had with the other facilitators as well as the relationship they developed with each other. The whole experience from start to finish was intense in a positive way and I felt on a constant high: during development; when we offered BYOD4L; and when we engaged in related scholarly activities generated as a result - this project of shared reflections being a perfect example.
Why it worked for me?
What worked for me was the camaraderie, how facilitators quickly became a well functioning team. Facilitation team members took responsibility for specific tasks. We relied on each other knowing the work would be done. We were committed and supported our participants as well as each other. Every learner mattered. Every facilitator mattered and we were in this together!
The facilitator buddy system worked really well and the Facebook facilitators' community space resembled a vibrant market place. There was honesty, openness and transparency in our relationship and a real buzz as a result of the collaboration. Communication was very smooth, decision making was painless and quick. There was freedom for all to do it their way based on initially agreed upon guiding principles. Our shared beliefs and values helped to make this to work and make it a success. We all reflected during the week on our roles and it was lovely to gain insight into my colleagues’ facilitator experience as it was happening. When it was all over I was sad despite feeling physical exhaustion. I didn't really want it to end. I wanted the festival to continue…and I think other facilitators and participants wanted this too ... according to what I read and heard...
Reflecting on the facilitator experience as a whole, what I valued most was the opportunity to work with dedicated colleagues and form new professional relationships as well as strengthen existing ones. I felt part of a community and safe to be myself but also to take risks and experiment. We trusted each other and our decisions and found that this made a huge difference how we experienced BYOD4L.
Who learnt with us?
As BYOD4L was a registration-free course, we had no idea how many participated overall and who they were. We choose to do it this way as it was a pick ‘n’ mix offer. We can tell from individuals who visibly engaged that most of them seem to be educators in HE from many institutions in the UK and other countries.
Our engagement as facilitators and co-learners made a real difference to our participants and made active and multiple-way participation possible. It felt personal and meaningful conversations and relationships developed as the days passed. The facilitation team spent quality time engaging with the participants. When one participant was struggling to find a working group, our first tweetchat session found colleagues who were able to help. While I initiated the search, it was the team of learners who created the solution.
From the artefacts created and what I read in the various social spaces, the Google + community, the Facebook community, Twitter and professional portfolios, it became clear to me that participants really felt part of a community and recognised that we showed real interest in what was shared and cared for them.
Opportunities for personal professional development
As a facilitator on BYOD4L I found a great opportunity to learn and here are some specific development points which have been valuable helping me to develop new and refine existing skills and behaviours as an open educator.
· Co-development and co-facilitation as collective CPD: Through this project I became more aware of the significance of effective collaboration as a valuable tool for individual and collective CPD. We were not just facilitators but were also co- learners and engaged fully in the BYOD4L activities reflecting on our experience in their portfolios. As a result of this facilitator-learner activity, many of us submitted claims for badges. · Tweetchats: These daily, synchronous hour-long interactions on Twitter attracted a lot of interest. It was the first time for me to actually organise a tweetchat. I am endlessly inquisitive and I wanted to try something new. I introduced the ‘question shower’ format. My buddy was Alex. Inspired by dear old
Socrates, we invited everybody to ask questions and respond with another question. It was a real shower as questions kept coming. It was fascinating to experience how conversations emerged through these and how individuals picked their conversations. It worked unbelievably well and I now feel much more confident organising tweetchats in the future. · Open badges: Using badges in BYOD4L was helpful, especially as we developed the criteria, set the badging system up and introduced peer review of claims. David Hopkins was instrumental in this area. I now have a much better understanding linked to open badges and how they can be used to recognise informal professional development and act as motivators. As a result of the open badges we used in BYOD4L I have started using them in other professional development projects.
Challenges
· Institutional buy-in: We had mainly educators participating from around the UK and beyond but as far as I could see, there was limited engagement by colleagues from my own institution. This might have been due to a combination of factors: at the time I was new to the institution and hadn’t managed to establish an extended internal network to establish a local voice as an academic developer; it often takes years (Debowski, 2014). Perhaps the channels used to promote BYOD4L were not reaching the individuals and groups who might have been interested.· · Visibility: Facilitation at the start was more hands on and I personally felt the need to be seen. I soon realised that facilitation tasks were shared among the group. The buddy- system we used was really useful for this. Also, when there was a critical mass, conversations flowed more naturally with much less facilitator input. Facilitators did engage in many of the conversations as they found them interesting and thought provoking. · Time: Developing and facilitating BYOD4L was an intense experience. It required concentrated commitment. I think for most of us the facilitating was parallel with our day-to-day job as well as in our free time. I think for a week this was manageable and was valuable CPD for all.
Final thoughts
Setting up the best learning event or course in the world and expecting it to ‘run’ on its own is not going to happen, is it? This is why learning spaces are just spaces! I agree that they can be welcoming but they can also push people away. We need to remember that people can bring spaces alive and bring others in. People can make spaces expand or shrink... We create individual and collective learning ecologies and reach out for each other, in different spaces, physical and/or digital. We come together to share, to create and to grow… individually and collectively.
I must say that growing did seem to happen, individually and collectively. There was a strong sense of belonging and camaraderie in BYOD4L. BYOD4L was so much more than just an open space or course. It became an ecological system, thanks to the people, and it had a massive heart beating with excitement and the desire to share and learn.
For me, BYOD4L was a worthwhile experiment in the open and it was a journey into new discoveries as both a facilitator and co- learner. I would definitely recommend that colleagues build their own open educational spaces with others.
References
Conole, G. (2013). Designing for learning in an Open World. London: Springer.
Debowski, S. (2014). From agents of change to partners in arms: the emerging academic developer role. International Journal for Academic Development, 19 (1), pp. 50-56.
European Commission (2013). High Level Group on the Modernisation of Higher Education. Report to the European Commission on Improving the quality of teaching and learning in Europe’s higher education institutions. European Union, available at http://ec.europa.eu/education/higher- education/doc/modernisation_en.pdf [accessed 5 March 2014]
Elton, L. (1995) An Institutional Framework. I n A. Brew (Ed.) Directions in Staff Development, Buckingham. The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, pp. 177- 188.
Jackson, N. J. (2013). Ecology of Innovating. Lifewide magazine, Issue 7, available at http://www.academia.edu/4404358/Learning_Ecologies [accessed 12 January 2014] p. 17.
Nerantzi, C. (2014). A personal journey of discoveries through a DIY open course development for professional development of teachers in Higher Education. Journal of Pedagogic Development, 4 (2)., Available at http://www.beds.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/316262/A- personal-journey-of-discoveries-through-a-DIY-open-course- development-for-proefessional-development-of-teachers-in-Higher- Education.pdf [accessed 9 October 2015]. Nerantzi, C. & Withnell, N. (forthcoming). We just ‘clicked’ or sharing team experiences, a reflective conversation between a learner and a facilitator of an open online course. In J. Whatley and C. Nerantzi, (Eds.) Teaching with Team Projects. Hershey PA: IGI Global.
Nerantzi, C. & Beckingham, S. (2014). BYOD4L - Our Magical Open Box to Enhance Individuals' Learning Ecologies. In N. Jackson and J. Willis, (Eds.) Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities and Colleges (Chapter C2), available at http://www.learninglives.co.uk/e- book.html [accessed 9 October 2015].
Nerantzi, C. (2011a). ‘Not too much facilitation going on’ - Issues in Facilitating Online Problem-Based Learning in Academic Development. In Celebrating the Past and Embracing the Future: Evolution and Innovation in Problem-Based Learning, Conference proceedings, 30 & 31 March 2011. Problem-Based Learning Special Interest Group of the Higher Education Academy Health Sciences and Practice Subject Centre, pp.111-124.
Nerantzi, C. (2011b). “Anyone there?” Online Problem-Based Learning within Academic Development, MSc dissertation in Blended and Online Education, Edinburgh Napier University (not published).
Redecker, C., Leis, M., Leendertse, M., Punie, Y., Gijsbers, G., Kirschner, P. Stoyanov, S. and Hoogveld, B. (2011). The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change. European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies EUR 24960 EN. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, available at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=4719 [accessed 5 March 2014]
Roche, V. (2003). Being an agent of change. In P. Kahn and D. Baume (Eds.). A guide to Staff & Educational Development, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 171-191.
My Reflections of being a Facilitator on the BYOD4L course
Chris Rowell
My name is Chris Rowell and I work at Regent’s University London as a Technology Enhanced Learning Advisor. In this role I organise and deliver all aspects of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) within the university. I also manage a number of projects setting up and promoting learning technology, supporting academic teams to develop new courses and have a wider role in developing and embedding TEL strategy across the university. In my professional life I have recently become a Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology (CMALT) and I am a member of the conference committee of SEDA. I am also a founder member of the SEDA special interest group (SIG) on TEL.
Brief introduction to the course I facilitated and what attracted and motivated me to be involved
Sue Beckingham, who I first met at a SEDA conference, invited me to be a facilitator on a new course that she and Chrissi Nerantzi had set up. When I heard the words ‘Bring Your Own Device’ I instantly said ‘yes’ without really investigating what I’d let myself in for!
I was really pleased to be asked and I said ‘yes’ for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was great to have access to the wonderful course Sue and Chrissi have created (http://byod4learning.wordpress.com/). It’s a short 5 day course with the main objective of demonstrating and showing the potential of using mobile devices in a learning context. It’s a truly open course, as a participant you don’t have to register and although the 5 days have a series of structured activities it is really up to the learners to decide how much they are going to complete. The ‘subject matter is grouped around 5 themes; connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating. In the topics there are a series of tasks based around different scenarios. So for example, on the first day there is a short YouTube
video of a student and lecturer talking about mobile phones and wondering how useful they could be in their own studies. The scenarios, resources and structure of the course are great and will be useful to anyone interested in mobile technologies.
The second reason I was attracted to the course was the opportunity to ‘work’ (is that the right word?) alongside and with other people from other universities on a specific teaching experience. I’d not done this before. The only two facilitators I had met in person were Sue and very briefly David Hopkins (Learning Technologist at Leicester University). I had a brief telephone conversation with Andrew Middleton from Sheffield Hallam. All the other facilitators from a variety of different institutions I had not met in person before. However we were very quickly communicating with one another via various social media tools, including Twitter, Skype, YouTube, and rather less successfully (for me) Google hangouts.
Thirdly, I was attracted to the new experience of being a ‘facilitator’ and what that involved. For 20 years I was a classroom teacher and during that time I really thought of myself as ‘facilitator’ in the classroom. For me, good teaching always involves interaction between students and between the students and myself, so inevitably involves collaboration. My role as the teacher was to create the activities and give instructions, help and feedback in the classroom (and sometimes online). When I started to look at the BYODL4L ‘course’ I realised that the facilitator’s role was very similar to this but the tools to do it are totally different. Gone is the face to face support and direction. I was interested to see how the social media tools facilitate this type of learning.
My facilitator experience
The most surprising thing that happened on Day One was organising a meeting of my colleagues here at Regent’s University to discuss the BYOD4L course. To be honest it was a very last minute thing. I had I brief telephone conversation with Andrew Middleton on Friday afternoon and he said he was going to organise a f2f meeting at his university. I quickly wrote an intranet article and booked a room for Monday, I wasn’t really expecting anyone to turn up at such short notice. However, 6 people turned up – two of them I had never met before. I gave a brief overview of the course and we had a fruitful discussion.
The second thing that I found really interesting was the tweetchat in the evening…or should I call it a ‘Twitter storm’! Between 8 and 9pm that night participants and facilitators joined up to discuss the first topic of ‘Connecting’. The facilitators asked a series of questions, like ‘What mobile devices do you use?’ ,’What apps do you use?’, and then people a tweeted an answer. It was crazy! Tweets came flooding in from everyone – it was great! To make a comparison to a classroom situation it was like the teacher splitting the class into small groups and then asking everyone to answer a series of questions…sometimes this is a crazy activity when everyone is fully engaged, as the noise level grows and people become excited by the discussion. The ‘text storm’ felt like this…it was exhilarating!
Sometimes it was a bit tricky following all the tweets and I think its worth discussing what learning is actually taking place in this ‘tweet storm’. When you’re in the classroom you can wander round and monitor the discussion and give advice and direction. This was happening online too – to some extent. Also in a f2f situation it’s easy to pull the discussion together and maybe sum up the important points at the end. Again, this happened online using ‘Storify’ and people blogging about the discussion.
This got me thinking about some further questions about the tweetchats: Is there any learning taking place?…there is some interaction but its limited ….is it just a glorified way of doing a survey?….would it work in a different context? How do you stop getting lost in it? Was it fun? Creative? Repeatable?
On Day three it was my turn with Ola Aiyegbayo to co-facilitate the Twitter discussion in the evening…It’s quite stressful the first time you are the facilitator in the Twitter discussions! We had a few apologies at the start – not surprising as this is day three and doing it every night is a big commitment. The discussion was a bit slower than the previous two nights but lots of great points and interesting tools mentioned. I decided to go back and have a look at the time line again over the weekend. The difficult bit is responding to so many different issues…just one Tweet takes a few minutes to read, process and respond to - then you look up and another 10 tweets have come in rising whole new bunch of issues!
The plan of action was that Ola tweeted out the questions using the Media Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group (MELSIG) account
and then I tweeted them again using my personal account. I think this worked as nobody as far as I know said they missed the questions.
Some thoughts and observations about the learners
The leaners on the BYOD4L course were a mixture of academics and professional services mainly from the Universities where the facilitators were based. I was really interested to see if they would engage in the evening tweetchats and how these discussions would evolve and develop. It was my impression that there was a ‘hard core’ of contributors each evening and they would be joined by various other people over the week. The learners appeared to fit into White’s and Le Cornu’s use of the of the metaphor of ‘Digital Residents’ and ‘Digital Visitors’ (White & Le Cornu, 2011). Some of the learners just wanted to use Twitter to carry out a specific aim, such as accessing the back channel at a conference whilst others were trying to start or further develop their own ‘personal learning environment’ (PLE).
What worked for me and how do I know
As my main participation in the BYOD4L course was the use and encouragement of Twitter it really was a useful tool in terms of increasing communications of the learners. Learners were welcomed into the Twitter discussions and groups and sub-groups quickly formed within the discussions which in turn started to build up little communities of learners. All of this was done through a fairly casual or informal method of communications (Reed 2013).
Value for me personally to engage with this open course
The biggest benefit to me of the BYOD4L was that it has really shown me the value of developing an online CPD course. Soon after the course finished I set up and delivered an online course for staff at Regent’s University London on how to use Twitter in an HE context. The content of the course was developed by Helen Webster (Head of Writing development Centre at Newcastle University) and made available to others using the Creative Commons licence. I am further developing this initiative, so that in October this year I will be developing and delivering an online course on LinkedIn #RUL5DoL and a another course in December called ’12 Apps of Christmas’
#RUL12AoC. I work in a small University and do not have the resources of a large team to develop similar initiatives so I realised I would have to do this on my own. I think that my involvement in the BYOD4L course gave me the confidence to develop and deliver these courses on my own.
Challenges I experienced
Firstly, on a personal note, I realised I needed more that just asynchronous online direction on my role as a facilitator. On the Thursday evening the facilitators met up via Google hangouts to have a group meeting and discussion about our role. For some technical reasons (which I haven’t fully worked out) I was unable to join the meeting. That night and the next morning I started to feel a bit lonely and peripheral to the group of facilitators …its such a weird feeling! Anyway the next afternoon I had a good chat with Andrew Middleton, one of the other facilitators, and soon realised that all the things I was thinking were shared by the others too. I needed the chat (on the telephone) to bring me back into the group but I wondered if the participants on the BYOD4L course would feel the same when we began on Monday?
I wanted to say a few things about feeling ‘Guilty’. I think it’s the role of the ‘facilitator’ that makes me feel like that. I didn’t have a role in the design and set up of the course which I’m very used to when I am involved in some teaching activity. Again this is probably my fault: I seem to remember many emails and posts in Facebook from Chrissi and Sue asking for feedback and comments on the course. In retrospect, I wish I’d looked at the course in more detail before we started and made a contribution to the design or content of the courses. I probably would have felt more ‘ownership’ of the process and less guilt as a result.
The other reason I think I was starting to feel a bit guilty about my contribution was that I wasn’t really clear about my role as a ‘facilitator’ …I constantly felt like I wasn’t doing enough but was struggling to find the time to do more. It was the first week of a new term at work and it was manic with new inductions for both staff and students and loads of issues to do with our VLE. I think the facilitators’ instructions were clear and I had a good chat with Andrew Middleton on the Friday before the course started. Throughout the week Sue and Chrissi posted words of encouragement on Facebook
but I still felt I wasn’t doing enough. Maybe I was and that my contributions to the tweetchats in the evening were enough. I didn’t contribute to the Facebook chats or anything happening in Google+ but just didn’t have the time at work.
Which brings me onto the ‘tweetchats’! I thought I knew what the Twitter Chat was – obviously not! I have been involved in what I thought were ‘tweetchats’ in the past but these obviously involved fewer numbers and were spread over a longer period of time. The 8 to 9pm slots on Monday to Friday were not what I expected – they were crazy. They were the digital version of ‘popping candy’ (probably cola flavour!) where everything fizzed and exploded for an hour or so! The facilitator got things going by asking a few questions and then there followed a stream of answers, thoughts, further questions, jokes, links to useful stuff – literally a ‘mish mash’ of consciousness! It was great whilst you were just contributing to the discussion but I found it very difficult when Ola and I were the facilitators. Maybe I’m just not quick enough tweeting. I would look at a tweet, think that’s a really good point, think of a response, tweet a response, then look at the twitter timeline and a further 10 tweets had come in! Still that’s the beauty of tweetchats: others answer the questions and then little discussions break off with just a few participants.
Lessons learnt and tips for others
If I was to facilitate the course again there are a few things I would do differently. I would put more emphasis on the face to face discussions and plan and deliver more workshops to support the online course. I organised one workshop on the first day (at the last minute) and six people turned up. I think I could have followed this up with other workshops to support the online activities or just use it as an opportunity to discuss those activities.
Another tip would have been to advertise the BYOD4L course more widely across my university. I put an advert on the intranet a week before the course started but not everyone reads this so if I’d followed this up with some dedicated emails/flyers and posters I think I could have got others to be more interested in the course.
Finally, I would have liked to have contributed more to the content of the course. It always feels weird to me to deliver someone else’s content (even if that content is really good). I could have made some
of the videos explaining the scenarios or helped with some of the blog posts. I think this would have given me more ‘ownership’ and enabled me to be more proactive as a facilitator during the Twitter conversations.
Overall, being involved as a facilitator on this course has a been a fantastic experience and has given me lots of ideas for new things I can try out. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone else thinking about something similar!
References
White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16 (9). Available at http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049 [Accessed 12 June 2014]
Reed, P. (2013). Hashtags and retweets: using Twitter to aid Community, Communication and Casual (informal) learning. Available at http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view /19692 [Accessed 12 June 2014]
#10Dot Ten Days of Twitter http://10daysoftwitter.wordpress.com/
#RUL10DoT Ten Days of Twitter for Regent’s University London http://regents10dot.wordpress.com/
Facilitating the unknown David Hopkins
David is a leading and respected Learning Technologist currently working at the University of Warwick. He earned the award of Highly Commended Learning Technologist of the Year from the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) in 2014, and is the author of several books on and around learning technology and understanding the roles of Learning Technologists. His most recently self-published work is 'The Really Useful #EdTechBook’, which has been described as a “mix of academic, practical and theoretical offerings [and] a useful recipe book for any Learning Technologist” by Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor of Learning Technology, University of Plymouth.
Taking on the role of a facilitator on someone else’s course is not something you should accept lightly. More often than not you do not know the resources or learning materials, and it’s very likely you’re taking on extra responsibility on top of your already very full work schedule. You are probably thinking more about your own perspective and experience of the topic than what the student can (or should) get out of it. These are all very valid reasons to think twice before accepting the invitation; no matter how much you want to do it, no matter how good you think it’ll be, no matter how good you think you will be, and no matter how nice the invitation sounds.
As an eLearning Consultant with Warwick Business School it is my job to think about the appropriate use of technology and the considered implementation of it for learning. I take my responsibilities seriously and strive to enhance and improve learning opportunities for students of all background and all abilities. I like to make sure I have time and space to think clearly, plan properly, implement wisely, and praise vocally. So, to take on a facilitator role with the Bring Your Own Device 4 (for) Learning course run by Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham, was completely out of character, for me.
So, why did I do it then? Simply for the experience and because the subject is one close to my own interests. Throughout my time as a Learning Technologist (from 2007) I’ve struggled with the same issues that many of us have struggled with - the fact that the work
stations and PCs we’re supplied with as staff in an UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) are often of lower spec than the ones in the student areas or that the students bring with themselves. I have experienced the fact that PCs the students use in the open access areas had a more up to date edition of Windows and Microsoft Office (Windows 7 and Office 2011 .. the ones with file extensions .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx) but the staff machines had not been updated yet. Thus staff couldn’t open the files and assignment submissions from the students! Yes, really!
So, from these experiences, I was already aware and fully versed in the possible pitfalls of institutionally-supplied hardware, and the willingness of both staff and students to bring and use their own equipment. In some instances it was actually the only reason why some things got done: with both staff and students using their own laptops often meant they were both using the most recent editions of Windows or Office suite, or they had the ability to install or run some non-standard software that IT Services were not able to support.
So, with this in mind, BYOD4L was a great opportunity for me to (a) see if others had had the same kind of experiences as me, (b) learn what tools or techniques other people had used to incorporate BYOD, and (c) learn from Chrissi and Sue about designing and running an open online course.
But my experiences with BYOD4L were more than just the course, the materials, the connections, the collaborations, and the reflections. It was also about taking a role in running the course, outside of my usual (institutional) systems and day-to-day role. The daily topics/tasks of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating, and Creating enabled participants to look at different aspects of the learning journey (as students) and think about their own practices. Which is exactly what I did - I took part as a student as well as being part of the team of facilitators, and I blogged about my experiences and thoughts as I went - http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/tag/byod4l/page/2/.
A large part of the course, for me, was the daily tweetchat: from 8-9 PM each day the team (including me) would engage the learners, or anyone for that matter, online on Twitter and pose a series of questions based on the day's topic, to stimulate and guide the discussion. By using and following the #BYOD4L hashtag learners
could engage or just watch the tweets fly in from all corners of the globe, and they did!
Getting Ready for a Tweetchat
In order to run or facilitate the tweetchat I worked out a system of what I needed and how I’d use it. This included:
Beer: In the fridge, ready and waiting for the end of the session. Laptop: running with Chrome browser open: logged into Google Docs where I’d collaborated with Sue Beckingham on the questions for our session, a tab where I was logged in to the @BYOD4L Twitter account so I could post the questions. iPad: running with the Twitter App, logged in as myself, so I could participate and encourage the tweets through retweets (RT) and replies, as well as looking over the generic #BYOD hashtag that some people were using, and replying to direct messages (DM) or replies directly to me. iPhone: Ready in case either laptop or iPad died on me or lost connection, or to take a photo and post to the hashtag (like this one: http://instagram.com/p/juaBEPxtkE/).
Chargers: make sure everything is either fully charged or plugged in. You never know how long that battery life will last.
Reflections on running a Tweetchat
Here are a few of my thoughts and reflections from facilitating a tweetchat:
Explain: make sure you explain a little about Twitter and a tweetchat, how it works, and why you’re doing it. Not everyone will understand it the way you might. Hashtag: advertise the hashtag well in advance. Remind participants they can save the hashtag after they’ve searched for it on Twitter, then it’s easier to find on multiple devices when they need it. Keep the hashtag as short and as unique as you can (remember the 140 character limit!) so as to leave as much room in your own tweet and your participant tweets for the actual content. Account: Consider having a course-specific account to use for posing the questions rather than your own personal one. This is good if you will have multiple facilitators engaging the participants, but is not necessary if it’s you on your own (see support below). Support: If you know the engagement level will be low you can probably handle it on your own. If you think there may be more people engaging (there is no definitive figure here but my experience is that more than 15-20 participants will make it hard to handle on your own) then get support from colleagues. Participants: participants will need an account to engage and join in the tweetchat, but not if they just want to watch the tweets. Highlight this as not everyone has, or wants, a Twitter account. Time: Try and arrange for a time suitable to your audience, remembering the differences in time zones if your audience is international. You won't find a time to suit everyone but if you show willingness to take this into account when you set it up it’ll reflect well on you.
Reminders: Use the accounts that will be used during the tweetchat (your own and / or the course account) to remind those watching and using the hashtag about the event, time, etc. I like to use a few tweets in the days leading up to the event, the morning before it, one hour before and the minutes leading up to it.
Announce: Begin the tweetchat with a welcome message. Close: Close / end your tweetchat with a closing message, statement, or call to complete a tweetchat survey. If you are running these regularly then remember to highlight the next one. Don’t forget to link to or tweet about the archive.
Archive: Work out how you want to make your archive (for your own posterity as well as for participants, those who took part and those who didn’t). Look at tools like Martin Hawksey’s
TAGS Explorer (http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter- archive-tagsv5/), Storify (https://storify.com/), and TweetArchivist (https://www.tweetarchivist.com/), among others.
But above all, enjoy the experience! It was wonderful to be engaged with so many like-minded passionate individuals, both the learners AND the course team. You can see, above, what I took away from the BYOD4L course and tweetchats, but what struck me most about both experiences is that there is a clear passion and enthusiasm in education at the moment, coupled with such advances in how we use technology (mobile devices, social media, OERs- Open Education Resources), that I believe it is true that teachers who don't use technology will be replaced by those who do. Yes, these advances may only be from a few individuals at the moment, but the list of participants in these types of courses (as well as the courses themselves: e.g. AppSwap Breakfast, 10 Days of Twitter, 12 Apps of Christmas, etc.) are growing. I can't wait to see what's next.
A facilitator’s journey: a game of two halves…
Neil Withnell
Neil Withnell is an Associate Head Academic Enhancement, School of Nursing, Midwifery, Social Work & social Sciences at the University of Salford, UK. Neil is a qualified Mental Health nurse and following a successful career in nursing started teaching in 2002, Neil is particularly interested in technology enhanced learning and flexibility in education.
I am Neil Withnell, and I am an Associate Head Academic Enhancement at the University of Salford, UK. My background is that of a qualified mental health nurse and I made the move to working in higher education 12 years ago. I thoroughly enjoy teaching and am always looking at ways of enhancing my teaching and “bringing the classroom to life”.
As part of this enhancement I came across an open online course entitled ‘Flexible Distance and Online Learning’ (FDOL131) back at the start of 2013. I had a quick look at the materials on the WordPress site and the activities that were there as part of the course. It was great to see an opportunity to develop myself and I noticed that problem based learning was part of the course. Being familiar with using problem based learning (face-to-face, not online) made the decision to join a little easier. I decided to start and read around this and found the work of Savin-Baden and Wilkie (2006) very useful. Without too much hesitation I had enrolled ready to start as a learner! The course was attractive to me as it appeared to be a safe environment where I could familiarise myself with many new tools and with the knowledge that I would be supported and would be working alongside others in a similar position to me. The advantage of the course being completely flexible was an added attraction due to working in a very busy School of Nursing with thousands of students.
In the blink of an eye the course came and went, and I have to say that I learned a great deal and met some great people. It was very interesting that the course developer, Chrissi Nerantzi, actually worked at the University of Salford!: small world.
I continued about my business as usual, when I received an email from Chrissi asking me if I would like to be a facilitator on the next iteration of FDOL, due to start in the Summer of 2013. For anyone that does not know Chrissi she can be very persuasive, though to be honest I did not really need any persuasion as I found FDOL to be an excellent course and was honoured to be asked to be a facilitator. I facilitated on this iteration of FDOL (FDOL132) and also another iteration, FDOL141, at the start of 2014. During this time I also joined in with another course, Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L) again as a facilitator.
First half - The experience of FDOL
So I kicked off with FDOL 132 as my first venture as a facilitator, excited but also nervous. I was a facilitator alongside three other facilitators and keen to support both the learners and my fellow facilitators. I read around the role of a facilitator and I like the work of Brockett (1983) who highlights three skills for effective facilitation (for adult learners): attending, responding and understanding. I was mindful that I needed to address these as an effective facilitator.
So FDOL132 started and I wanted to let the learners know that I was present and what my role as facilitator entailed. I completed my video introduction (another first for me) and introduced myself in the Google+ community. It was exciting to see the learners quickly jump on board and there seemed to be a flurry of activity, lots of introductions and sharing of experiences. I felt at ease as I noticed that many of the learners were from a similar background to me and wanted to enhance their skills in online learning in order to benefit their students. The learners that wanted to learn as part of a PBL group were allocated groups and I suddenly felt a lot more responsibility. The group that I was facilitating was a great group and we quickly settled in, helped by a Google hangout where we could "meet each other". Looking back I find that this was vital in the early stages! After this initial hangout and an agreement on the ways that the group will work, the course seemed to fly past and was a fantastic learning experience. I was mindful of the skills needed and
tried to ensure that I was attentive, responsive and understanding. I probably was a little too attentive and responsive at the beginning as I was eager to jump in and respond to every post in the Google+ community! I realise I needed to be a little more relaxed and allow the learners to find their way around at a reasonable pace. Looking back on this experience I feel that this course worked extremely well. The participants were all keen to participate and were very supportive of each other. I feel that this allowed me as a facilitator to relax a little and allow the group to develop and work on the topics. The participants are vital and as a facilitator I feel that once the participants find their way of working and communicating then the role of facilitator is one of “being in the background”. This is certainly my experience of FDOL132.
FDOL141 was the next venture and in true tradition it was amended again after feedback from FDOL132. There was a call for more facilitators and this was great to see. The course was slightly shorter and changes included the removal of formal webinars (the previous recordings were available). The beginning of the course was a little chaotic, partly due to the challenge of determining the number of learners who wanted to be part of a PBL group, and how the facilitators would work together. I was pleased to be paired with a colleague who had participated on FDOL132 and we worked well together. The group were very supportive of each other and had regular hangouts and completed a lot of the work synchronously. The pairing of facilitators was a new experience for me and this worked extremely well. My fellow facilitator was very keen as this was new for him and we formed a close working partnership. The participants were mostly from the same area and were motivated to complete the course, partly due to gaining credit for their practice. The challenges for me were to be mindful that the facilitators did not take over the work and organisation of the group. As there were two of us it did appear early on that we were leading the group as the number of participants was quite small. However, over time we shared out the meetings and support to ensure that one of us was always available if needed. Looking back I feel this was a positive aspect of pairing up as the participants could see we were available if needed.
Second half - The experience of BYOD4L
BYOD4L was an altogether different experience. I was asked again by Chrissi if I would like to be involved and after looking at the course I was intrigued! How can a course be delivered in 5 days? I wanted to find out and “in” I went. There were a number of facilitators in this course and they all seemed to be much more experienced than me. Another first for me was the use of Facebook as a means of both the facilitators’ support and as a forum for the learners. I had a Facebook account but never really used it. A Google hangout was arranged and this was a fantastic online meeting which was full of enthusiasm; I was eager to start. The first day was fairly hectic, everyone trying to find their way around and respond to each other. My fellow facilitators seemed to do this with ease. The course had tweetchats every evening and I was paired up with Sue Beckingham for the first evening. This was a fantastic event, albeit rather frenzied but a great learning event and Sue was messaging with encouragement and guidance throughout. I finished the tweetchat and remember feeling tired but exhilarated. The following tweetchats were all amazing and it was great to see such enthusiasm and support. Tweetchats are a rather frenzied affair, referred to by a fellow facilitator as “more like a twitter storm” which does seem more appropriate. I found the tweetchats beneficial as they were quick and often everyone responded without the need to spend time thinking about their answers/posts. The posts are limited to 140 characters and everyone has to get their message across succinctly, which I find to be beneficial to my own learning style. Often I found myself struggling to keep track of all the discussions as I was getting embroiled in various “chatter” but the benefits of looking back at the chat was useful. Conversations did continue outside of the tweetchat time and this was helpful to me to keep the discussion going. The course outline was extremely well thought out, again a WordPress site was there with all materials and guidance. The course offered open badges and an opportunity to create a daily blog in order to claim badges. Although I was a facilitator I became a learner also (as ever) and found myself wanting to blog and claim these badges. The camaraderie, support and enthusiasm over these five days was absolutely amazing.
Post "match" analysis
The two courses, although different, provided me with an opportunity to be a facilitator. I found this to be highly rewarding and this enabled me to look at myself, and how I work with others. I realised that learners are busy people and the offer of open courses is an opportunity to develop within a flexible arena. I consider myself a learner alongside the role of facilitator and have learned a great deal from others.
The flexible approach meets my needs and I feel this addresses my particular learning style.
I faced many challenges, as I work in a very busy School. After a day’s work it is difficult to find the energy to work in the evenings, and at weekends, but I found myself full of enthusiasm to join in. I suppose looking back I did not want to let anyone down!
I have learnt many lessons going forward, and these will help me in my current role. With online courses it is vital to provide a lot of support and guidance early on, which will show the learners that the support is there and encourages progression. I feel that this is also true of face-to-face courses/modules as learners are new to the group and need time to establish ground rules etc. I feel that once the learners find their way and settle in and get to know each other and are familiar with the course materials, the facilitator can slowly “back-away” and observe and support as necessary. The initial starting of a course/module needs the extra input in my view.
Early synchronous activities are vital as it helps to see who you are working with and people are less of a stranger. This is an opportunity to see who you are working with and makes the journey more personal and a shared venture. The learners also feel this is a vital part of an online course and were keen to meet up on a regular basis.
References
Brockett, R. (1983). Facilitator roles and skills. Lifelong Learning: The Adult Years, 6(5), 7-9.
Savin-Baden, M., and Wilkie, K. (2006). Problem-based Learning Online. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
My role as a facilitator: The value of reflection from multiple personal perspectives
Sue Beckingham
Sue Beckingham is an Educational Developer, taking a Faculty lead role for technology enhanced learning (TEL) at Sheffield Hallam University. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and also a Fellow of the Staff and Educational Development Association (where she is a member of the Executive Board).
Her teaching portfolio includes Professionalism and Communication; Digital Marketing; Web 2.0 in Business; Social Media Use in Organisations; and Information Design. She is also a course designer and facilitator of the cross institution open online course ‘Bring Your Own Devices for Learning’ and co-lead of the weekly Learning and Teaching in Higher Education online chat #LTHEchat.
Sue’s research interests alongside TEL include digital identity and connectedness, and the use of social media in higher education and business. As a lifelong learner she has recently completed a second Master’s degree, an MSc in Technology Enhanced Learning, Innovation and Change.
Introduction
I am an Educational Developer and Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University where I have taken a Faculty lead for technology enhanced learning (TEL). My teaching portfolio includes professionalism and communication, digital marketing, Web 2.0 for business, social media use in organisations, and information design. My research interests include the use of social media in higher education, online presence, digital literacies and TEL. As a lifelong learner I have recently completed a second Master's degree at Sheffield Hallam in Technology Enhanced Learning Innovation and Change. My thesis considers the impact of Twitter on my own self-
development - an ethnographic-self review of how I have built a rich and valued personal learning network. Indeed it is through this very network that I became involved initially as a participant in open online courses and then as a guest presenter for Chrissi Nerantzi's Flexible, Distance and Online Learning course (FDOL131). It was late Autumn 2013 when Chrissi and I met up at the SEDA conference, where she shared an idea she had about a new open course and asked if I would like to be involved. With no hesitation I said yes and our conversation continued during the conference, whilst waiting for our separate trains home, and during the journey via Twitter direct messages. By the end of the same evening we had both a framework and the course site set up. We called it Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYOD4L).
I will come back to BYOD4L as the focus of this paper, but also wanted to mention that no sooner had the course finished I was invited by Chrissi to contribute to Flexible, Distance and Online Learning (FDOL141) co-leading with David Hopkins a weekly tweetchat and then a month later as a facilitator for the Openness in Education course. Since then I have continued to work with Chrissi and we have led BYOD4L for a further two iterations in July 2014 and January 2015.
What I hope to share here is an insight into my roles as a new facilitator within open online courses and the experience as a student taking online courses; and what influence this had going forward on my role as an online facilitator. As a lifelong learner I find the ability to step into the shoes of a student incredibly useful for my teaching practice, bringing empathy for the student which in turn then helps me consider my approaches as a facilitator of learning.
Reflecting on my experience as a Student
I'd like to first of all share some memories of my own experience as a student as these have helped to shape the way I have approached my role as a facilitator, looking specifically at my own online learning experience. About nine years ago I took my first online course which used Moodle as the VLE. There was limited interaction that was reliant solely on what seemed at the time a 'clunky' discussion board with infrequent discussions taking place. This left me with quite negative feelings of distance learning. At the time there were fewer opportunities to develop a social presence or indeed socialise in
online learning spaces. Reflecting on my more recent experience as a student taking a 'learning at a distance' online course has made me look again at online learning in a different and very positive light. Starting with multimedia 'about me' videos/screencasts to introduce ourselves, the fortnightly webinars and the autonomy and access to organise our own digital spaces to meet as peers; we got to know each other really quickly. Granted technology has advanced but so has the pedagogy. By buddying us up to work together in pairs and small groups for different activities it really helped us to gel together as peers. We became comfortable in the places we shared our learning. White and LeCornu (2011) propose that 'place is primarily a sense of being present with others…a sense of social presence.' Within these new spaces we each felt this and indeed often talked about it. We liked that we had developed our own supportive community of practice and had become facilitators of our own informal learning. This was an empowering feeling!
Both of these experiences have been useful and have helped to inform my role as a facilitator of learning. The socialising aspect is an important part of any learning experience and an aspect that needs to be built in. The bonding time with peers, building trust and getting to know each other makes for a more honest and rewarding partnership. Drawing upon what worked well and what didn't in my own learning has helped me to reflect about how, when and why I should take a new approach, what support might be required, and the value of feedback and interaction.
Bring your own devices for learning
To give some context BYOD4L is a 5 day open online course. We described it as follows:
BYOD4Learning is a truly open course, or an ‘open magical box’ for those who don’t like the term ‘course’ very much, for students and teachers (nothing is locked away or private and you won’t even need to register) who would like to develop their understanding, knowledge and skills linked to using smart devices for learning and teaching and use these more effectively, inclusively and creatively.
The hub of the course was the WordPress site and the learning spaces included a Facebook Group, a Google+ Community Group and Twitter using the course hashtag #BYOD4L. In addition we also held daily tweetchats where participants contributed to a themed
conversation using #BYOD4Lchat. This hour long chat was held at 8- 9pm GMT. The themes chosen replicated the daily topics found on the course site. These were connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating. Participants in the course seemed to be mostly a mix of Academics, Educational Developers and Learning Technologists; although we also had some students contribute to the tweetchats. Learners could choose to engage with any of the activities on the course site, interact in any of the social spaces, and if desired collect badges by evidencing their learning within a personal blog. The autonomy and permission to develop their own learning paths with support and guidance from the nine facilitators was the message we wanted to be heard.
Learning in open social spaces
Miller (2009) identified four key constructs when researching adaptable spaces and their impact on learning. These are basic human needs, teaching, learning and engagement. (See Figure 1) Whilst Miller was looking at physical spaces, these areas are equally important for online learning, as are the sub-headers in the diagram.
Figure 1 Miller 2009
Building on this model I will use it as a lens to consider my role as both one of the Course Leaders for Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYODF4L) and as a Facilitator. The dual perspectives will
allow me to reflect upon the responsibility I had for the learners taking the course but also for the team of volunteer supporters I worked alongside who helped to make BYOD4L happen.
Basic Human Needs: comfort, convenience, support for the learner
As a starting point it is important to consider how we can support learners orientate themselves within a new learning environment. Key to this as a facilitator was keeping a watch early on to answer any questions raised by participants via the course channels. These included the comments section in the course blog, Google+ community page, Facebook page, or as tweets using the course hashtag #BYOD4L in Twitter. (We also had a #BYOD4LHELP hashtag but this was never used.) What was interesting was that irrespective of where the questions were raised, they were often answered by a learner, particularly on Twitter. Peer bonding was evident as such interactions then led on to a short discussion and sometimes the suggestion to 'DM me your email and I will send you [insert article or other form of information]'.
As a relatively new online facilitator I was both a learner and responsible for learners. I learnt a lot from observing Chrissi Nerantzi. I used this and my experience as a student to consider how to best support learners. I was conscious that it was equally important to make the volunteer facilitators on BYOD4L feel comfortable and supported too. Holding a Google Hangout with Chrissi for our facilitator team went down well. Participants said it had helped them to feel connected with each other bearing in mind that they had never met before. One facilitator who was unable to make the hangout said his non presence had left him initially feeling 'out of it' and a little disorientated. Fortunately there was engagement by all in the facilitators Facebook group which was set up with a good lead time prior to the course starting, giving everyone the opportunity to chat, socialise and raise questions.
Regular tweets to signpost where to find information were made by the facilitators. Interacting with tweets made by the learners was very important prior to the start of the course and throughout the week. For many this was a very different learning experience they were embarking on.
Teaching: Method; Technology and Tools; Flexibility; Effectiveness
Introducing the daily tweetchats required consideration of both the learners and the facilitator team in terms of explaining what it was, how to take part and the preparation prior to consider the format. Guidance was written for both the learners and the facilitators (for whom this was also a new experience). We used a shared Google Doc for facilitators to contribute to and collaboratively worked together to plan the daily chats. Pairs were allocated as 'Chat Leads' for each day. Questions raised by facilitators were asked using the comments box in the page, but we also discussed the forthcoming chats in our closed facilitators' Facebook group and during the Google hangout. This method was very effective as it provided the flexibility for asynchronous conversations to take place at a time that was convenient. These spaces are very important considering that we were physically located in different places across the globe. Taking an open shared approach to plan was also a positive aspect and one that helped us work together as well as we did.
Thinking about the technology used within the course, we provided guidance on the course site for students. Our role as facilitators included signposting these multimedia resources to the learners. As tools were identified as part of the learning journey we added these to Edshelf which is a website where users can curate and share themed collections of apps for learning and teaching. Our curated collections are organised under the themes of connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating. For example: https://edshelf.com/profile/suebecks/connecting. As learner conversations developed it was helpful to draw upon examples of use, of which many were shared by the facilitators and learners themselves. We were all learning!
Learning: Style; Technology and Tools; Flexibility; Effectiveness
Providing a variety of learning spaces allowed learners to choose where they felt most comfortable, but also gave them the opportunity to listen in other spaces and join those as a new experience if they wished to. As facilitators with full-time jobs and life outside, we were concerned we would not be able to be everywhere all of the time. In anticipation of international participants in different time zones where contributions were bound to include both asynchronous and
synchronous conversations; we decided between the team to share the focus across the different areas. So a couple took the lead in the Google+ community, another the Facebook group and the rest Twitter, with Chrissi and me monitoring the WordPress course site for comments. That said I still felt a responsibility to both look at and interact with all the spaces. At this stage I couldn’t anticipate what questions might arise, what support our learners might need and if I am honest what interesting interactions I might miss if I didn’t!
As mentioned earlier many of our learners bonded quite quickly, but particularly during the tweetchats, however it was evident that some needed to be drawn in to the conversations. One described the interactions as ‘madly chaotic’, and another raised concerns that as a dyslexic it was initially quite difficult to keep up. The role of the facilitator is therefore key to provide support, guidance and feedback. Laurillard (2002:55) argues that ‘action without feedback is completely unproductive for a learner’. Providing feedback using comments in learners’ blog posts and acknowledging tweets by replying or even re-tweeting, I feel made an important contribution.
Engagement: Communication; Collaboration; Interaction; Sense of Community
Garnett (2010) talks about learner generated contexts as a co- creation model, requiring learners who develop new collaborative and personal literacies for learning and teachers who develop learners’ abilities to create and manage their own learning. As facilitators of this new learning experience, we all became co- learners and co-creators. For many of us these were new ways of learning. We as facilitators learnt from each other and with our students. This in itself and the many shared interactions was the essence of what made this learning community so special. Open communication where so many shared their ideas, their questions, and sometimes their concerns, was for me what made the experience so engaging. This was applicable to both my role as a facilitator and as a learner.
Conclusion
Taking the opportunity to reflect upon my experiences as both a learner, facilitator and course leader has been a valuable experience.
Having empathy as a learner and how it felt myself as a new facilitator has without doubt encouraged me to consider the way I engage with participants of BYOD4L. Enabling an open, supportive and interactive environment where we learn together is an essential part of what makes a positive co-learning experience.
References Garnett, F. (2010). Heutagogy and the Craft of Teaching. The Heutagogic Archives. Available at http://heutagogicarchive.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/heutagogy-the- craft-of-teaching/ [accessed 9 October 2015]
Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational framework for the Effective use of Learning Technologies (2nd Ed). London: Routledge.
Miller, H. (2009). Adaptable spaces and their impact on learning Available at http://www.hermanmiller.com/research/research- summaries/adaptable-spaces-and-their-impact-on-learning.html [accessed 9 October 2015]
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3-10. Available at http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm [accessed 9 October 2015]
White, D. S. and LeCornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday. Available at http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049 [accessed 9 October 2015]
Facilitating and Residing in a Digital World
Sam Illingworth
Sam is a lecturer in Science Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he enjoys the co-learning experiences that teaching in higher education can bring. His research involves investigating the links between science and society via different forms of popular culture, and he also enjoys writing (bad) poetry, a selection of which can be found here.
Bring Your Own Device For Learning (hereafter Bring Your Own) is a fully open course, that ran from 14th to 18th July 2014, and which was designed to run fully on smart devices, aiming to present an immersive learning experience that encourages active experimentation and discovery learning (Nerantzi and Beckingham, 2014). During a series of facilitated activities, the participants were encouraged, over the course of the five days, to: connect, communicate, curate, collaborate, and create, by sharing and working with others across a variety of social media platforms.
I was asked by one of the Bring Your Own organisers (Chrissi Nerantzi from Manchester Metropolitan University) to help facilitate during the week, and I immediately said yes, as I knew that it would be a fantastic learning opportunity, which would aid in both my development as a facilitator, and also that of my digital footprint.
In her 1996 paper on the role of facilitators, Ackerman (1996, pp 93) states that, “while the benefit that facilitators can bring is acknowledged, developing the necessary skills and techniques is more problematic. There are few manuals for would-be facilitators to draw upon, and much of their ability is acquired through experience.” Whilst I have considerable experience in facilitating, which stretches across many different subject areas and levels of expertise, the notion of facilitating in a virtual environment was completely alien to me, and I felt that the Bring Your Own experience would serve to remedy this.
Prior to the beginning of the course I volunteered myself to help facilitate the Bring Your Own Facebook group, and to help run one of the timetabled tweetchat sessions.
In their 2012 paper, Wang et al. (2012), found that many of the fundamental functions of a learning management system could be easily implemented into a Facebook group, and I also found this to be the case. By regularly monitoring the Facebook group I was able to provide feedback and assistance on queries, comments, and links to blog posts in a timely and interactive fashion. Wang (2012) also noted that students did not always feel as though their privacy was adequately protected via interaction with Facebook groups, and whilst this did not appear to be the case during the Bring Your Own experience, more could have been done to ensure that all participants were aware of how to suitably adjust their privacy settings for their individual needs (e.g. to stop articles that were posted in the group from appearing on ‘non-Bring Your Own’ Facebook friends’ walls).
Tweetchat can be thought of as a chat room for Twitter users, utilising the hashtag (#) to find specific topics and connect with others who are talking about those topics on Twitter (e.g. Manning et al., 2011). Throughout Bring Your Own the nightly (20:00 - 21:00 GMT) tweetchats were a veritable success, with dozens of people engaging via hundreds of tweets. On the evening of Thursday 17th July I helped to facilitate the tweetchat on the subject of ‘collaborating’, and it proved to be an enjoyable if somewhat exhausting experience. Earlier in the week I had actively engaged with the other tweetchats, but in facilitating I felt as though I had a duty to ensure that all queries were followed up, and that no avenues were left unexplored. As with facilitating the Facebook group, it was pleasing to see that my non-digital facilitatory experience could be put into good practice, and it certainly helped me to get through the evening in one piece!
Weaver and Gahegan (2007, pp 324) define a digital footprint as “the digital traces each one of us leaves behind as we conduct our lives”, and as a lecturer in Science Communication I am aware of the importance of creating a unique and effectual digital portfolio that showcases both my research and my professional development in a constructive and accessible manner. During Bring Your Own I wanted to continue the development of this portfolio in two ways: 1) by exploring new tools, social media sites, and apps, and in turn how
I could then use these to inform my own teaching practices and enrich my students’ learning experiences; 2) by connecting with a new network of people from across the Bring Your Own community.
During Bring Your Own I have kept a blog of my learning (and facilitating) experiences using the microblogging site ‘Tumblr’. Having previously used ‘Wordpress’ for my blogging needs I was surprised at the relative ease with which I could set up a new account and post articles in a variety of media. My only main concern with Tumblr was that it was not possible to leave comments for individual blog posts, but I was eventually able to resolve this issue by choosing a theme that allowed me to synchronise with my Disqus account1.
During the course of the week my role as facilitator ensured that I was indeed able to connect with a whole new network of people (evidenced by my Twitter followers increasing by over 50) across a variety of different platforms, which I sampled throughout the week. My strategy for being an effective facilitator involved making sure that I engaged with a variety of people on the daily tweetchats (See above), as well as trying to follow up on all loose threads and questions that were posted in Twitter with the #BYOD4L hashtag. As a facilitator on Facebook I ensured that I read all of the posts, and that I left comments wherever possible, structuring these comments so that they sparked further thought and discussion, There was some debate as to whether it was better to comment directly on the blog themselves, or to leave comments on the Facebook group wall. I started off by doing the latter, but as preferences shifted, I tried to alter my strategy to suit the individual needs of the poster, whilst also considering the needs of the group. A good compromise seemed to be to leave detailed comments on the blog posts themselves, and then briefer comments within the Facebook group. In future Facebook facilitations, the best option would appear to be to leave detailed comments on the blogs themselves, and then shorter (but different) comments in the Facebook wall which were specifically designed to spark debate within the Facebook group.
Prior to Bring Your Own I had been unconvinced about the use of Facebook as a learning platform and of Google+ as any kind of platform of all, but my experiences showed me that Facebook can
1 Disqus is a blog comment hosting service for websites and online communities
indeed be used to engage with a willing and able community, and that Google+ is actually quite a lot more than the superfluous entity that I had assumed it to be. That being said, one of the main criticisms from participants in regards to the Google+ community was that it had a tendency to be used as a “dumping ground for blog advertisements”, and at times I was guilty of that. However, from my limited interactions with this community I feel as though there are a lot of opportunities to promote cooperative learning and development, although in order to do this I need to better understand the tools that are available and investigate the most effective way to utilise them. I aim to do this by nominating myself to be a Google Plus facilitator at the next Bring Your Own event, and to ensure that I respond to posts, by leaving feedback and encouraging more interaction, feedback and reflection from the other community members.
One of the features of the Google interface that I admired was Google Hangouts, which I used to facilitate a session on ‘curating’ midway through the week.
During the tweetchat for the topic of ‘communicating’ on Tuesday 15th July I found myself being volunteered by Chrissi to host a Google Hangout (hereafter GH) session the following day on the topic of ‘curating’; a request which I found to be the odd and yet intoxicating mix of flattering and slightly unnerving. Whilst I had experience of using GH for conference calls I had never before used it to facilitate a learning experience, and so I had some trepidation about how I would successfully utilise GH. However, I thought that a GH would be useful to other members of the Bring Your Own community, as well as being a great experiential learning experience for me as a facilitator; the fact that I hate saying no to anything also played a strong part in me accepting the request. During the GH, as was the case with the Facebook community, it was great to be able to draw on my experience as a facilitator to run this session, whilst augmenting it with the toolkit that was made available to me, not least the ability to livestream the discussion and automatically record it to my YouTube site.
Kolb (1984, pp 41) defines experiential learning as, “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.” A lot of my teaching practices are based around an experiential model, but sometimes I am guilty of providing too much
of a safety net. This GH experience, in which I was to some degree thrown in at the deep end was a very useful learning lesson, as it has made me think about the potential positive implications that pushing my students beyond their relative comfort zones might have, and I am looking forward to experimenting with this over the next academic year and beyond. Perhaps Dewey (1910, pp 340) summed this slightly sadistic approach when he said that, “the business of education might be defined as an emancipation and enlargement of experience.”
In their 2011 paper, White and Le Cornu (2011, pp 5) talk about ‘residents’ and ‘visitors’ in relation to their use of the Internet. Visitors, they propose, “understand the Web as akin to an untidy garden tool shed. They have defined a goal or task and go into the shed to select an appropriate tool which they use to attain their goal.” Residents on the other hand, “see the Web as a place, perhaps like a park or a building in which there are clusters of friends and colleagues whom they can approach and with whom they can share information about their life and work.” They go on to say that visitors are more likely to share ‘finished’ articles or pieces of work, whereas residents are far more open to the idea of sharing half-formed ideas, and to foster contribution.
Prior to Bring Your Own, I would have thought of myself as a visitor, making semi-regular trips into the potting shed, to retrieve the hedge trimmers or the Christmas decorations. However, upon reflection it is quite clear that I am in fact a resident, and that whilst I might not quite be living in the penthouse of a Mark Zuckerberg or a Jack Dorsey, my two-up two-down council house, enables me to share information with my neighbours on a far more regular basis than I had imagined. Sharing half-formed ideas and ideologies for constructive feedback and collaborations is something that I believe is fundamental to the advancement of both science and society, and is something that I have always tried to practice in both my personal and professional life. It is this notion of collectivism that I most readily identify with in the role of the resident, and a strong reason for pursuing permanency within the digital housing scheme.
My experiences on Bring Your Own have been greatly beneficial to my capabilities as a facilitator, strengthening my knowledge and understanding of the basic principles and also introducing me to a new toolkit and modus operandi of facilitating digitally. As well as
giving me a thirst for further facilitation activities in an open and online setting, Bring Your Own has helped me to think about the way in which I deliver both lectures and facilitated workshops in a face-to- face environment, convincing me that further incorporating experiential learning methodologies into my practices could yield big rewards for both myself and my students. More than anything else though, it has enabled me to develop my facilitation skills through the acquired experiences that Ackerman (1996) so rightly prescribes. The Bring Your Own experience has connected me to a whole new network of potential (and actual) collaborators, across a variety of different research and teaching practices. Moving forward I aim to continue to use these new toolkits and networks to enhance my role as a facilitator and to enable me to connect, communicate, curate, collaborate, and create with people that were previously inaccessible to me.
References Ackermann, F. (1996). Participants' perceptions on the role of facilitators using group decision support systems. Group Decision and Negotiation, 5 (1), pp. 93-112.
Dewey, J. (1910 & 1991) How We Think. New York: Prometheus Books.
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Manning, C., Brooks, W., Crotteau, V., Diedrich, A., Moser, J., Zwiefelhofer, A. (2011). Tech Tools for Teachers, By Teachers: Bridging Teachers and Students. Wisconsin English Journal. 53 (1), pp. 24-28.
Nerantzi, C. & Beckingham, S. (2014). Bring Your Own - Our Magical Open Box to Enhance Individuals, Learning Ecologies. In: Jackson, N. & Willis, J. eds. Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities and Colleges E-Book. [Online] Available from: http://www.learninglives.co.uk/e-book.html. – invited chapter
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Weaver, S.D., Gahegan, M. (2007). Constructing, visualizing, and analyzing a digital footprint. Geographical Review, 97 (3), pp. 324- 350.
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Facilitating an Open Online Learning Course
Catherine Hack
My role at the University of Ulster
I am a lecturer in Bioinformatics at the University of Ulster and Subject Partnership Manager (SPM) for the Faculty of Life and Health Sciences. I am also course director for one of the largest programmes in the University which is delivered in two modes: via distance learning and face-to-face teaching. As SPM I manage partnerships with Further and Higher Education (FE/HE) institutions at Access, Foundation, Undergraduate and Postgraduate level both within the UK and internationally. The opportunity to interact with staff and students from across FE/HE provides an insight into the current issues that concern those returning to education or studying part- time, particularly flexible learning opportunities, the barriers and benefits of online learning, employability and retention.
Facilitating the BYOD4L course
My interest in using technology to enhance and transform learning and teaching led me to register for the BYOD4L collaborative open online course in January 2014. On each day of this 5 day course, participants discussed issues around the themes of Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating (the 5Cs) using mobile devices. I was really enthused by this experience particularly the quality of the resources and the opportunity to interact with colleagues from across the UK (and further afield), and across disciplines. However what I found really inspirational was the support from the facilitators, who provided encouragement but also prompted self-evaluation and encouraged me as a learner to reflect and develop my own practice. When the MELSIG (Media Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group) team discussed the idea of re- running BYOD4L in blended mode with regional support, I was keen to try and facilitate this across Northern Ireland (NI). Having delivered a range of workshops face-to-face with colleagues across NNI, I was interested in getting involved with the delivery of an open online
course, both in terms of this specific course and to determine whether the approach would be effective for other staff development activities.
There are two Higher Education Institutes in NI: Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster, plus six regional colleges of Further Education and the College for Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise. As Northern Ireland is a relatively small geographical area, it seemed appropriate and in the spirit of the ‘open’ nature of the course that I tried to facilitate the BYOD4L course across the FE/HE sector here. I contacted each of these institutions asking for expressions of interest in taking part in the BYOD4L course. There was widespread interest from teaching and support staff from across all of the institutions, with only one rather begrudging response from someone who did not understand the concept of an open course. The dates for the course to be run in blended mode in the first instance (14th -18th July 2014) coincided with a public holiday in NI, and both FE and the agricultural colleges, also tend to close in July, however 17 people indicated that they were interested in taking part. The course ran again in January 2015 with 41 participants, including participants from both universities, three of the FE colleges and the agricultural college (Table 1).
Table 1: Participation in BYOD4L course from across Northern Ireland No of No of Course FE HE participants institutions July 17 3 14 4 2014 Jan 41 8 27 6 2015
Participants cited a number of reasons for participating; predominantly these were focussed on developing an understanding of how technology could be used to enhance learning and practice. Other reasons identified were personal development and sharing best practice. Participants also recognised that using mobile technology for teaching and learning could help to engage students but had concerns around online safety and recognised the need for institutional polices and strategies.
Figure 1: Reasons for enrolling on BYOD4L open course
My Facilitator Experience
Face-to-Face vs Online support
Whilst the course was originally conceived as being delivered fully online, the advantage of delivery via blended mode is the possibility of providing face-to-face support. 31 of the participants wanted a ‘study buddy’ – someone from their own institution with whom they could work with throughout the course, whilst 21 wanted to have a face to face session at some stage during the course. A workshop was delivered at the end of the course, which attracted around 25 participants. It was very rewarding to meet new colleagues, and put faces to the twitter names. What was clear from the face-to-face meeting was the number of ‘elegant lurkers’ (http://daveowhite.com/elegant-lurking/), who had been watching the
discourse, but not actively contributing, and so were ‘invisible’ during the week.
Smaller online communities were also set up using Google+, with the following invitation:
“hello, this is a group learning space for those who want to work and learn as a smaller group (~10) during the byod4l week.”
Seven people registered for this group; I introduced myself and asked others to introduce themselves and indicate what they wanted from group, however no one responded. I then posted reflections on the daily theme, in the hope that more substantive questions might prompt responses; however there was no interaction from any of the seven members. I think this type of group has potential, but it may be more beneficial to use it to support a learning community who already have something in common, for example location, discipline or role. It could also be a useful platform to continue the learning after the main event, or for a deeper consideration of some of the issues raised and may have value for people who have already participated in the course previously and are looking to work with more experienced practitioners.
Tweetchats
Twitter was used to hold a synchronous conversation each evening of the course. Each of these ‘tweetchats’ focussed on one of the course themes- the 5Cs. Participants could find the chat on Twitter by searching for #BYOD4LCHAT. The moderators planned around 5 questions in advance of the event, which were posted at stages during the one hour chat. Each question was labelled Q1, Q2 etc. and respondents were asked to include the corresponding A1, A2 to indicate the question they were responding to. What was particularly heartening was to see those new to using Twitter observing the conversations and then joining in.
Tweetchat: Connection
I was a facilitator for the first tweetchat on Connection on day 1 of the course. Although I have had a lot of experience in facilitating online discussions this has been either via asynchronous discussion boards or synchronous voice chats. I perceived that the tweetchat
environment was going to be different on a number of levels; this was a little daunting.
Facilitating any online discussion raises awareness of the importance of expressing yourself clearly and ensuring that you are not misinterpreting the words of others. This is also relevant for a tweetchat, but with less time and only 140 characters to respond with! I was conscious that my target audience were primarily fellow academics, and with an open platform such as Twitter, I was also aware that tweets would be permanently and publicly available. Prior to the discussion, I envisaged that these considerations may limit my engagement with the tweetchat; however once it was up and running these concerns definitely took a back seat. I am aware that several of the NI participants ‘lurked’ in the tweetchats, perhaps due to similar concerns, or different ways of learning. It would be interesting to explore this further.
My previous experience with online discussions has been on postgraduate distance learning programmes. Although I aim to use a Socratic tutoring style during these discussions to actively engage students in the construction of their own knowledge these students still tend to look to the ‘teacher’ as having expert knowledge. Employing a Socratic style of tutoring on the BYOD4L course was actually easier than with traditional students, possibly as communication was with fellow practitioners with shared or similar learning goals.
My initiation into tweetchat facilitating was also eased by my co- facilitators Peter Reed and Anne Hole, who were ready to take the lead. Prior to the course starting we discussed the five questions that were used in the first run of the course, which were tweaked slightly to make Q4 and Q5 more open, resulting in the following questions:
Q1 What mobile device(s) do you use to connect with others?
Q2 What apps or services do you use to connect? Do you rely on some more?
Q3 What #BYOD4L forums have you used to connect today (Facebook, Twitter, G+) and why?
Q4 How do your connections help you with your learning?
Q5 Do you have any tips for connecting with others?
Peter and Anne took responsibility for launching the questions. I felt that my role was to:
remind my own local participants about the event and provide links to information such as ‘What is a tweetchat?’ on the BYOD4L main site. encourage contributions by providing supportive comments, encourage reflection by responding to comments with further questions provide links to resources re-tweet comments and questions that had got ‘lost’ respond to those on other platforms (G+ and Facebook) and remind and encourage them to check out the tweetchat
Tweetchat: Curation
During the wrapping up of the tweetchat discussing ‘curation’ on the third day of the course, the possibility of curating the tweets was mooted. I volunteered to experiment with Storify. By searching with the answer number and the #BYOD4Lchat it was possible to curate the responses by question. This provided a concise and navigable insight into each Q&A. This was particularly useful for closed questions, for example where participants were sharing what apps they found useful. It was much easier for those who were not available to take part in the live chat to get a snapshot of the answers. The feedback from other participants on the curated Storify was very positive, as can be seen from Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Posting of Curated Storify to Facebook group and comments
Unfortunately, as not everyone used the Q#:A# annotation some tweets were lost and tweets that went off topic were not captured. This would make it less effective at capturing the discussions around open questions. This also emphasises the role of the facilitators; there is a balance to be struck between maintaining the momentum of the discussion and reminding participants about the ‘rules’ or structure of the discussion.
Each morning I emailed my local participants with links to the previous night’s tweetchat and with an update on the day’s theme. This was effective at engaging slow starters and encouraging participation as the week progressed. Feedback and thanks from the group indicated that this approach was appreciated.
Value for you personally to engage with this open course
As a facilitator, and the second time of looking at the resources, I thought more about the video scenarios which were used to trigger the learning each day. These short, authentic videos describing real issues in teaching and learning prompted learners to undertake a number of activities, use quite different technologies and engage in wide-ranging discussions across different platforms. I currently use a problem-based learning approach in both face-to-face and distance learning environments, and this has inspired me to work with others to develop more video scenarios for my own teaching.
Continuing on the practical theme, I was inspired to try out a couple of new tools (Stripgenerator, Mendeley, Answer Garden) revisit some tools that I have been dabbling with (Evernote) and evaluate different platforms for the tweetchats (Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Tweetchat).
In a course like this, where the idea is to challenge oneself to explore new technologies and platforms, it was good to offer participants a range of platforms to chose from (Facebook, Google+ and Twitter) as well as the ability to comment on the main BYOD site, however I think I would need to identify a single platform to engage with my students. The use of one platform makes the workflow easier to manage, and also helps to manage student expectations. I currently use a closed Facebook group with a cohort of undergraduate students and a closed Google Community with postgraduate students. Both platforms are used in a similar way, primarily for sharing resources and for discussions. I am currently exploring the pros and cons of these platforms, but my current experience is that students are more willing to engage, share resources and post their ideas in a closed group.
Finally, what I learnt from the week (or had reinforced) is that it is not about the platform or the technology, but the willingness to engage, to share and to learn from each other, the desire to continually challenge one self and others, to reflect on what you are doing and to strive to improve.
Moving from personal to institutional engagement - my BYOD4L timeline
Sheila MacNeill
I am a senior lecturer in Blended Learning at Glasgow Caledonian University, based in a small team of three within our Learning Enhancement and Academic Development (Lead) unit. I have been at GCU since late October 2013. Prior to that I was an assistant director with a Jisc-funded national innovation support centre, CETIS. I was awarded the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year award in 2013 for my contribution to sharing innovation, ideas and practice across the sector.
The Blended Learning Team in GCU LEAD works collaboratively with learning technologists in each academic school to offer strategic direction, pedagogic guidance and practical support to staff in embedding blended and online learning across the curriculum.
(http://www.gcu.ac.uk/lead/leadthemes/blendedlearning/)
In the beginning - January 2014
GCU doesn't have a formal bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy, but like many institutions it has been considering developing one for a number of years. However, the responsibility for developing any such strategy was placed within our Information Services department - the potential of personal devices for learning and teaching was not necessarily at the forefront. From our most recent review of blended learning activities it was clear that mobile devices were becoming increasingly popular with students to access our VLE. In 2013 we saw an 18% drop in average student accesses to the VLE via the web and a 420% increase in access to our VLE via its mobile app. These figures alone could be seen as evidence that it was actually too late for a strategy around personal devices, they were here and the choice for students to access learning and teaching materials and activities.
The first iteration of the Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) open course in January 2014 came at almost a perfect time for us. We had evidence that mobile devices were increasingly the mode of choice for accessing our VLE. As a team we were keen to encourage the use of mobile (personal and institutional) devices amongst staff in their learning and teaching activities. We were also very keen to support open learning and to encourage staff to "dip their toes" into open, online learning and be students again using more open, social and mobile approaches to learning and teaching.
#BYOD4L ticked a number of boxes for us. It was openly developed by a well known group of peers, it was short (only a week), and its focus on using mobile, personal devices fitted perfectly with our development needs. We were also keen to learn from others about their experiences and practices.
In January we all decided to participate in the event. We promoted it via our own networks, and encouraged others in the institution to "have a go". I blogged before, during and after the event. As a team we decided to bring together the GCU #BYOD4L posse, as we referred to the group, for tea and biscuits on the final day.
(The GCU #BYOD4L usual suspects)
Additionally and perhaps more interestingly I was approached by a former colleague, Brian Kelly, to work collaboratively and write a guest post on each other’s blogs about our experiences. We shared a template for our posts, and looking back now, I think my final reflection sums up the experience and the issues that that first experience of #BYOD4L raised for me.
Final Thoughts
This is the hardest bit to write. As I said earlier I’m still processing the week. It’s been really useful to have some f2f chats with people and get different perspectives on things. It has reinforced the fact that I don’t mind a bit of chaos, and I that am confident enough online to “have a go” without having always having a clear goal in mind. This is probably equally a good and bad thing!
However, the one thing that I keep coming back to is time. Participating this week has required time commitment. Some evenings I’ve been able to join the tweetchat, others I haven’t. Some days I’ve been able to take a bit of time during the day to watch the videos, do a quick blog post, others I haven’t. Today a few of us have blocked some time out to discuss the experience. Creating that time is really important for us as academic staff but I think we also need to find ways to give students more time to become more comfortable with using their own devices in an educational context. If we are serious about integrating BYOD approaches into education, then we need to move beyond BYOD policies and think about how to redesign our courses to allow some time to just try things. We all need some space and time to play (or experiment if, you prefer) to develop the confidence and digital literacies needed to engage more fully with the potential that BYOD4L approaches to connecting, communication, curating, creating and collaboration can contribute to. https://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/guest-post-sheila- macneills-reflections-on-the-byod4l-mini-mooc/
In the Middle - July 2014
From a personal point of view the first iteration of #BYOD4L was really useful for me in terms of strengthening my connections with key members of the team, particularly the lead facilitators Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham. I knew them both virtually but really felt a much stronger connection with them after that week. This increased connection allowed us to easily develop a different kind of collaboration for the summer 2014 iteration of #BYOD4L.
In July our team developed an open, online event, GCU Games On, which ran in conjunction with the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. We had a very rapid development schedule, the event was
developed in under a month A number of the design decisions we took were based on our experiences of open courses, not least of which was the approach of #BYOD4L. Chrissi approached me to ask if we would be interested in developing a fun, collaborative activity between the two events as they were running in parallel for one week. I had no hesitation in saying yes. We decided to use Twitter and have a "creative challenge" and use Twitter to get participants on each event to share a sporty photo of themselves. https://twitter.com/BYOD4L/status/490056831293997056
It was a simple idea, but very engaging for our all our participants and allowed even more sharing between them. It also provided us with a unique opportunity to attract more participants to our event. The results of the collaboration can be seen in this storify. https://storify.com/BYOD4L/the-byod4l-and-gcugameson-creative- challenge
So, from a point where we had ruled out involvement with #BYOD4L due to our slightly manic development schedule in July, we were able to join both events together. Another great example of open collaboration.
January 2015 Becoming #BYOD4L partners
The latest iteration of #BYOD4L has seen yet another step my personal, and the Blended Learning Team's professional involvement with the BYOD4L team as this year GGU became one of the institutional partners of the event.
Once again #BYOD4L has come around at almost the perfect time for us. The university is committed to developing its fully online provision and has set targets for the coming year. The Blended Learning Team is responsible for not only supporting the initial lead programme development teams but also with developing a suite of staff development activities. #BYOD4L has provided us with a ready- made community, structure and resources that we have been able to incorporate into our plans. It has also been really good fun for us as a team, particularly with the making of our introductory teaser video. This has been something we wanted to do, not something we were forced to do - a key factor in any successful venture.
As well as being part of the wider facilitation team, during the week of #BYOD4L this year we ran daily, drop-in lunchtime (1 hour) sessions
for staff. Using the theme of each day as the basis for discussion, we decided to keep the sessions informal.
Like many other central departments it is sometimes difficult to judge what is the best approach between formal presentation style events or more informal, more discursive and free-flowing one. As a team we probably all favour the later approach as we feel that it is more successful in teasing out real issues from our colleagues.
From a personal perspective moving from a participant to a facilitator has changed my involvement with the event. It is great to be part of such a supportive and well-connected team but also a bit daunting. I wasn’t entirely sure what would be involved and how much time it would take. However, it has actually been relatively painless.
I was given access to: the WordPress account to add content to our institutional page; a Google docs folder with various information and more administrative-type tasks; and I was invited to be part of a Facebook group for general updates and communication. The only slight concern I had was the use of Facebook. Over the past two years I have been making a conscious effort to keep Facebook as work free as possible so I was slightly concerned that this would conflate my own work/life line. I also shared this concern via my blog during the week. https://howsheilaseesit.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/byod4l-day-2- communication/
However, it actually worked quite well and at least I saw the notifications, even if it maybe took a day to read them. It was easy to be the contact person for GCU and relay any messages back to my team. Being a facilitator did encourage me to take part more in the tweetchats each night. I was able to attend four out of the five sessions. I co-facilitated one of the chats, and although I didn’t know my fellow facilitators it was easy to communicate with them before the actual session via Twitter. I did feel more responsibility to try and engage with people I didn’t know during “my night”, and the hour did fly by and I felt quite exhausted, but elated, after it. It is hard to keep up so I think the team approach works really well and it was good to be able to learn vicariously from more experienced Twitter facilitators from the team.
Although I am a regular blogger, being part of the facilitation team gave me added incentive to blog everyday during the week either on my own blog or on our team blog. I felt it was even more important as
an institutional partner that I set an example of my approach to open reflection during the week.
At a team/institutional level, we are still reflecting on the experience of our more formal involvement and how we can learn from this years’ experience. Some of the issues we encountered as a team included:
Time
This is always the key issue we encounter from our colleagues when we try to do any staff engagement/development. There is never a good time, people are always busy. This year the event ran over our exam period so many staff were fully engaged with marking. Again this influenced our decision to take a more informal, drop-in approach - this follows the ethos of #BYOD4L - you as an individual decide how/where/when and for how long you want to engage. In terms of our team's time-line the event actually happened at a quite a good time for us. It tied in nicely with our overall plans.
Formal - versus informal staff development
As described above we decided to take a relatively informal approach this year. A key consideration for us going forward is to decide if this is the best way to continue or if we should look at more formal mechanisms or should we continue to develop a blended approach? For example, could we tie in/extend the framework provided by #BYOD4L into our formal CPD activities and even award some institutional recognition? This is an area we are keen to explore more and learn from other institutions where this approach is being taken.
Central versus school provision
As a central department there can sometimes be a tension between a perceived central-in approach to a schools-out one. In this instance we aimed to provide a neutral space for staff from all schools to come together and share their practice and issues. Possibly due to timing, we did have noticeably more participation from one school. So, how can we increase participation from our other schools? If we do that do we risk alienating other central services and collaboration opportunities?
Overall we feel that moving to a more formal institutional involvement has been worthwhile. Whilst our drop in sessions were small, they were productive and seemed to be very well received by those who did attend.
"The drop-in sessions are great for inspiration and motivation; everyone was so enthusiastic it makes me want to engage, and try stuff, just so I can join in the chat and use my experiences to personally help others. If communicating was the theme of yesterday, then the message was received – and today, in keeping with theme, I have connected so far today with Twitter, LinkedIn and now my first- ever engagement with WordPress!"
(https://gcublend.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/byod4l-day-1- connecting/#comments)
That comment alone made the whole experience worthwhile and provides an incentive to not only do it all again, but seriously explore how we can best develop our GCU blended approach to #BYOD4L.
Facilitation as a personal engagement in an open space
Andrew Middleton
Andrew Middleton is Head of Academic Practice & Learning Innovation at Sheffield Hallam University. He is best known for research into audio feedback and other digital voice pedagogies and leading the pioneering UK Media-Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group, interested in enhancing and transforming learning with digital and social media. Andrew has edited books on media-enhanced learning and is Managing Editor of the open journal the Student Engagement & Experience Journal.
My reflections of facilitating an open course come from my leadership of the Media Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group (MELSIG) and its association with the Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYOD4L) open course. I have already begun by describing BYOD4L as both ‘open’ and a ‘course’, yet my involvement caused me to reflect deeply on this. This is the focus of this article.
Facilitator as agitator
Firstly, I should say something about me to create a context for my approach to being an open facilitator.
I lead MELSIG. The SIG has been in existence since January 2008 and, though it has evolved over the years, its purpose has been to bring people together from post compulsory education (colleges and universities) in the UK to explore complex ideas about the use of digital media in education. This embraces media including variants of audio, video, social media and smart media; anything that is digital and can convey ideas, knowledge and presence. More than this, MELSIG embraces academic innovation by involving people with different roles and interests in devising events and other activities that lead to communal inspiration by sharing practice and ideas.
Open Education naturally fits within and alongside the MELSIG ethos.
While MELSIG continues to be a collaborative endeavour, I have brought some principles to the SIG which have influenced its current identity and purpose. Perhaps most important of these are the principles embodied by Communal Constructivism (Holmes et al. 2001). Communal Constructivism is essentially about taking responsibility for learning together through the co-construction of knowledge. The SIG’s ethos typifies an open Community of Practice (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002): always evolving; developing and stewarding knowledge; appreciative of different levels of participation; socially strong; supportive; vibrant, divergent and active; and persistent.
These principles, and others, are thoroughly ingrained in what I do. They mean that my interest in ‘all things open’ is simply a recent rendition of longstanding ‘alternative ways of being’. This essential desire to think critically and differently is not to be obtuse but an expression of never wanting to be satisfied with the status quo. This way of being explains, to some extent, how I came to be facilitating an open course alongside others.
In my day job I work for a UK University, being responsible for promoting academic innovation and professional development. Most people I meet in academia have surprisingly different conceptualisations of teaching and what it means to be in Education; however, we tend to share a desire to be good at what we do and agree that scholarship and professional development are helpful and important. For me BYOD4L, and the way it is delivered, is about thinking differently as a context for academic professional development.
Introducing my involvement with BYOD4L
BYOD4L explores the disruptive potential of personal smart technologies such as phones and tablets. I have been researching this topic one way or another since 2004 having published widely on related matters.
My motivation for being closely involved in the course came from realising that MELSIG needed to find new ways of engaging its community actively through common purpose. The idea of an open
course was suggested by Chrissi Nerantzi as part of a conversation we were having around developing a bid for an open and flexible CPD route. This resonated with the focus of my Masters dissertation several years earlier on open and reusable learning objects. I was inspired by Chrissi’s enthusiasm and my realisation that I had found a kindred spirit: someone who is prepared and able to take risks and who, like me, doesn’t keep a close eye on the clock if there’s a good idea to be explored!
Prior teaching experience as a facilitator
I have taught in higher education in a range of disciplines: Journalism, Computing Innovation, and Education Studies. I have designed and led staff development activities for most of my career. I have been closely associated with e-learning and the use of multimedia since the early 1990s.
In all this time I have looked to engage people differently: that is, to always find an appropriate way of addressing a subject, in particular heeding ideas about authentic learning (Herrington & Herrington, 2006).
The BYOD4L learning community
The learners on BYOD4L were mostly academics, educational developers or technologists. They were Innovators or Early Adopters (Rogers, 2003), already appreciative of personal smart devices, and if not already using them, they were certainly open, curious and motivated; keen to be engaged in a conversation about their potential.
A precondition for the course, which has now been run three times online over five days and used social media and freely available web environments, was a readiness for participants to engage together informally. There was a degree of trust involved: nobody involved in BYOD4L, including the facilitators, was able to predict how successful the immersive approach would be - we collaborated in an ‘act of faith’ and good spirit.
Reflecting on this, my impressions are that the trust was founded on the openness of the facilitators and perhaps this is a characteristic of Innovators; something to do with the need to take risks and have those risks ameliorated by a supportive peer group.
I also note that the facilitator group, which was made up of nine people, themselves constituted a significant group of learners working assiduously together in the lead up to the live running of the course, supporting each other through it, and subsequently reflecting together on what was involved. Indeed, there was a dimension to the course which was about the mode and methods it used which was of interest to all participants: while the course was labelled BYOD4L it could have justifiably been called 'BYOD & Open Learning Environments.' The teacher should always be reflective about the learning environment they are using, but in this case the methods, situations and tools were, by and large, new to the facilitator group members.
What worked?
As a facilitator it was the peer network of facilitators which was critical to the success of BYOD4L. The new environment continually threw up questions. These were sometimes technical in nature but more often they were about the need to establish good consistent practices. Consistency was an important concern because the course was designed around five days, each day being led by a different individual or pairing. I became aware that as the person leading on day 4 I could be faced with a retention problem if any of my predecessors went astray! Similarly if I got it wrong, day 5 could be surprisingly quiet!
Consistency was important for the learning group too. It is not realistic to expect the students to 're-learn' the learning environment each day; key aspects of the course needed to be predictable and so usable.
It quickly became clear that the daily 'tweetchat' between 8 and 9pm was a key time period for everyone taking part. People commented that they were disappointed to miss a chat session if they had had other commitments and not been able to make it.
The tweetchats were the one commitment that defined 'being on the course.' You could 'do' the course (i.e. complete the tasks) without having to engage with anyone else in real time, but 'being' on the course was defined by the synchronous interactivity that happened for an hour each evening. I was extremely disappointed that I had to miss the last evening of the first iteration due to another pressing commitment.
I have run 'bar camps' or 'unconferences' before and I have been part of online courses before in various roles. I am aware that the social dynamic is important, especially in Education and the social sciences. Ideas about social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and social presence (Sung & Mayer, 2012) are important to successful learning taking place. Given the number of people who were from the region around West and South Yorkshire in the first iteration I decided to announce a bar camp meet up for Day 4 in Sheffield where I am based and I encouraged people in other regions and academic development groups to run related events. Four of us gathered in Sheffield for two hours to compare and develop ideas and we created a video artefact together which was shared with the rest of the cohort. This felt slightly disruptive: BYOD4L had mostly been talked about as being ‘open and online’, but I realised that it was the principle of openness above everything else that was important, and to me this meant being open to anything that was appropriate to successful delivery and engagement with the course. It was good to meet in person; almost conspiratorial. This added enormously to my experience of BYOD4L and I think the others who met would agree.
As a learner I made the most of the opportunity to undertake the tasks. Like other learner-facilitators on BYOD4L, I appreciated the structure and tasks arranged over the five days. These things, while intensive, made them manageable and interesting.
Personal and professional benefits
I am responsible for academic innovation and professional development in my university's central educational development unit. The course provided me with a way to explore the possibilities of using personal and web-based technologies creatively as a context for CPD. I enjoyed working closely, albeit at a distance, with like- minded people and sharing our different ideas, knowledge and skills. Working together in this way gives innovators confidence and allows us to assess, evaluate and therefore reduce the risks we take. Our communal interest validates our activity; something that is often difficult to do with colleagues in one's own institution where there can be a dominant development culture which can subdue innovation.
Challenges
I was not experienced with all the environments we used. As a learner this was good: there was something to learn. As a facilitator, this was not so good: I wanted to be confident in the tools we used feeling that one of the responsibilities of a facilitator is to be able to support learners to get the most out of the learning environment.
This was compensated for by having such a large facilitator group, so I was not overly concerned. In the event both the students and facilitators managed admirably, though I would pay closer attention to this in other situations.
Conclusion: Lessons learnt
I have been involved in other problem and project-based online learning environments. BYOD4L convinced me again that good teaching and learning is perfectly feasible in an online environment. More to the point, it is particularly feasible in an open environment.
Perhaps the key lesson that I learnt was the one I had set for myself: to understand the viability and characteristics of successful open learning. The context for this intended outcome was my own frustration with a largely uncritical trend evident in higher education for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). I have written about this elsewhere (Middleton, 2014) and concluded that the important phenomena in this trend are to do with:
· Social - the appreciation of co-learners and co-facilitators; · Space - the situation that comes from the co-commitment of others and the readiness to use physical, virtual, formal and informal opportunities to meet personal and collective aims; · Open - this is mostly encapsulated in the idea of being open to learn in ways that do not necessarily conform to preconceptions or previous experience, valuing the dynamic and unique character of the collective space experienced in different ways by individuals; · Learning - the common intention of all those involved is to learn and support learning.
My suggestion, therefore, is for others to look at the opportunities we can create together to establish Social Spaces for Open Learning.
Finally, I began by noting some uncertainty with the idea of ‘course’. It has been a question that has interested the BYOD4L facilitator group since its inception and one which has finally allowed me to understand why I think referring to an open experience, like BYOD4L, as a course is correct. A course is a personal commitment to learn in a semi-structured way. This is a learner-centred definition which I think sheds light on any learning experience, and it is what I have learnt about learning in general that I have particularly valued from being a BYOD4L facilitator.
References
Herrington, A. and Herrington, J. (2006). Authentic learning environments in higher education. Hershey, USA: Information Science Publishing.
Holmes, B., Tangney,B., FitzGibbon, A., Savage, T. and Meehan, S. (2001). Communal constructivism: students constructing learning for as well as with others. Proceedings of SITE 2001, Florida.
Middleton, A. (2014 ). Learning in the open: A constructive critique of openness. Student Engagement & Experience Journal, 2(2).
Rogers, E. (2003). Diffusion of innovations, (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.
Sung, E. and Mayer, R.E. (2012). Five facets of social presence in online distance education. Computers in Human Behavior, (28)5, 1738-1747.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind and society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wenger, E., McDermott, R., and Snyder, W.M. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press. Online at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2855.html.
Tweetchat experience - what’s in a ‘140 character tweet’
Kathrine Jensen
I work as a research assistant at the Teaching and Learning Institute at the University of Huddersfield where I support and connect colleagues to develop inspiring and innovative teaching and learning. In effect this means I spend a lot of my time trying to tap into ongoing work by my colleagues and develop ways for people to make connections across the University with colleagues who are doing similar or interesting work. Therefore I am always very interested in learning about and trying out different ways of creating networks and connections as well as sharing teaching and learning practices. I had also recently been to a SEDA conference and attended a workshop by Colin Gray (2013) where he showcased his design for bite-sized staff development which included making use of an online environment as a way to encourage busy and time-limited staff to engage with continuous professional development. This bite-sized approach was also used by Chrissi Nerantzi (2011) in the teaching and learning conversations (TLC). There is, I think, a convincing case for the benefits of social networking technologies for educational and scholarly purposes (Weller, 2011 and Veletsianos, 2012).
So when Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham put out a call for people to volunteer as facilitators in an online learning experiment called Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L), I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try out participating in such a ‘course’ and also gain some experience as a facilitator. The BYOD4L course was a five day ‘learning experiment’ that focused on using mobile devices for learning. It was developed by Chrissi Nerantzi and Sue Beckingham - the main site was hosted on the WordPress platform and centred around five topics:
• Connecting • Communicating • Curating
• Collaborating • Creating
A key element was the evening tweetchats and two facilitators had the responsibility of running one of them each day.
Let the tweeting begin
After the five days were over, I found myself coming back to the tweetchats and what a really great activity and experience they were. I think I was surprised how much useful sharing and conversation there was even with participants answering different questions or getting lost at times.
It was Day 2 of the #BYOD4L course with the topic ‘communicating' when I co-facilitated the evening tweetchat with David Hopkins. I was not sure what to expect as I had not done this before but I must say that despite my newbie apprehensions about ‘being in charge’ of a tweetchat for the first time, it was a great experience and the hour flew by. Our more experienced colleagues were also very supportive and encouraging so that helped. My anxiety that the responses to our prepared questions would be a tweetchat full of virtual tumbleweeds happily didn’t come true.
I know that tweetchats can seem superficial and can be read as people just tweeting about, linking to or listing what they have done or found interesting and can appear to be a one way stream of communication. But I disagree with this on the basis of the following three points, which I see as “outcomes” from the #BYOD4Lchat:
1. When participants tweeted about their practice you could see from the responses and the retweets (RTs) that others were reassured about their own experiences and practices as well as also interested in others using different approach that they could try out. I think this was evidenced by follow up questions/conversations and acknowledgment RTs. So when I responded to Q4 Do you use your device more for giving instructions (broadcast) or dialogue (conversation) with “I think I started out with mostly broadcasting but am now using them more and more for dialogue” and instantly got a RT saying “me too” this felt like a real positive affirmation of my experience, I was not alone.
2. It was obviously a networking opportunity to find like-minded people that you could contact later on and apps/tools you wanted to try out. So I would argue that the potential for long term impact cannot be denied. In fact I ended up collaborating on editing a Flipboard magazine as a result of a suggestion from a fellow facilitator Anne Hole and this has turned out to be a really useful tool and will soon be my news reader alternative to Zite. 3. Because it is synchronous, it is useful to build a sense of ‘togetherness’ that Google+ and Facebook and commenting on blog posts can’t quite do. I find this quite hard to articulate but it was the sense that you knew these people were there, online at the same time as you and investing their time and sharing the experience. It allows for jokes and asides which makes it fun and personal.
Saying a lot with a little? Tweetchats as junctions
Another critique of tweets and by extension tweetchats are based on the limitation of 140 characters but of course the reality is that you are not limited to one tweet and this is exactly why the chats can seem chaotic and feel overwhelming because there are so many tweet threads going on. People were also posting links that you could follow up later so in this sense the tweetchat worked as a sort of connective junction or a hub from which you could travel in many directions.
It is a challenge with the tweetchats that there is a lot going on at the same time and that you are aware that you are missing out on a lot of tweets and ideas. As a facilitator, I think you just need to accept that it is ok that you are not on top of what everyone is responding to in a tweetchat. After the event you can then ensure that the tweetchat is saved by using Storify or another curating tool in order to be able to revisit anything you might have missed. I think for the facilitators (and the participants) there can also be a pressure to respond to others with answers of some sort but I am not sure this is the best way to view the activity/engagement that is happening as it is more about sharing and developing ideas/views than finding answers. I found it particularly useful to try out a technique suggested by Chrissi that we respond to questions posed in the tweetchat with other questions. This was a great strategy that took the pressure off in relation to
providing answers and allowed greater exploration of some of the assumptions inherent in the statements and questions people posed.
For me the tweetchats were a great bit of glue and momentum builder for #BYOD4L. You could perhaps also argue that it is a way to maximise (or force?) those moments of serendipity, when you come across a person or a resource at just the right time in an online or in face-to-face environment.
Benefits of engaging in online collaboration
I really enjoyed being part of a small but enthusiastic group of people from all over the world that pulled together to support what I think you can only call an ‘experiment in learning’. Being part of this meant I pushed myself to try new things. For example I created and edited a youtube video introducing myself (I am not fond of seeing myself on screen so this was a huge deal for me to actually get done). This also meant I downloaded and used an app called Capture on my iPad and used a simple youtube editor tool. I also participated in a Google Hangout with other facilitators and this was also a first for me, so all very useful tools to get more experience of.
As I consider myself to be quite keen on structure and possibly ‘over- preparing', being a facilitator on an experimental 'course' with a flexible, multi channel design in a topic that I was not at all an expert in was a challenge for me. But for me it has become increasingly important to work on moving outside my comfort zone(s) and saying yes to being a facilitator was a way to continue engaging with ‘what learning is’ within evolving contexts and outside traditional structures. I don’t think I am ever going to stop feeling that I am slightly underprepared but from this experience I think I have become more comfortable with not having answers and that sometimes asking more questions is a better way to progress ideas and thinking.
However, I think it is important to point out that I was concerned that my lack of experience in supporting learners and lack of expertise in using some of the suggested tools would impact negatively on the learners as perhaps I wouldn’t be able to suggest appropriate ideas etc. Of course I can’t be sure that this didn’t happen but I think that the ethos of ‘co-learning’ meant that there was an understanding that we were all learning from each other and there were of course also more experienced facilitators who could step in and offer their expertise which was a great support for me. The outline of the role
and responsibilities of facilitators created by Chrissi and Sue was really useful guidance but if there hadn’t been such a big pool of facilitators with varied experiences I would not have felt as comfortable being part of BYOD4L.
Tips for tweetchat facilitators
• Get together with your co-facilitator to plan the questions • Five questions seemed about right for a one hour chat but it could be worth having a few extra questions as back up • Consider promoting a pre-chat activity that can form the basis for some of the discussion • Make sure you demonstrate how the chat will work by tweeting, before it starts, the ‘rules of engagement’. eg. Q1 respond with A1 • Have two facilitators, one for posting questions and one that keeps reinforcing ‘the chat rules’ or guidelines in order to help out people who missed the questions and generally support the flow of the chat. • Be prepared to be flexible and go with the flow in terms of skipping or changing questions depending on how the conversation is flowing • Have a way to capture the chat so that it can be revisited. We used Storify
References
Gray, C. (2013). Designing bite sized staff development to increase participation, creativity and knowledge exchange. 18th Annual SEDA Conference, Creativity in Educational Development, 14 November 2013 - 15 November 2013. Summary available at http://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/6_Gray.pdf; presentation available at http://www.seda.ac.uk/resources/files/Colin%20Gray.pptx] [accessed 9 October 2015
Nerantzi, C. (2011). Teaching and Learning Conversations. Flexible, bite-size staff development by, with and for academics. In UCISA, Engaging hearts and minds: Engaging with academics in the use of technology enhanced learning. Available at http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/~/media/Files/publications/case_studies/SSG ASG_Engaging [accessed 9 October 2015]
Veletsianos, G. (2012). Higher education scholars' participation and
practices on Twitter. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28: 336–349. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00449.x
Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic. http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_97818496 66275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml
Facilitating an online course for the first time
Anne Jones
I’m Anne Jones and since the end of 2014 have been doing freelance consultancy based in England. Prior to that I was employed at Queen’s University Belfast as an Educational Developer. I was at Queen’s for nine years, having previously taught Geography at all levels in HE in England since the late 1970s. My work at Queen’s was very much focussed on assessment and feedback building on my experiences as an academic. I worked on the Jisc-funded e-AFFECT (e-Assessment and Feedback for Effective Course Transformation) project, I delivered CPD courses on assessment and feedback as part of the annual programme of CPD and taught on the Queen’s University Belfast Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching for new staff.
Introduction to the course
Rachel and Rod have introduced the course and its structure. I met Rachel and Rod through the Jisc Assessment Programme where MMU and QUB were in the same cluster. It was through this connection that Rachel invited me (as well as others in the cluster) to participate in the course. I had just completed the Teaching Online Open Course run by Oxford Brookes University and thought this would be an opportunity to use some of that experience in facilitating an online course. I was also motivated by the topic and the opportunity to share my own experiences and hear what others thought about assessment.
My facilitator experience
I very much enjoyed the experience of helping to facilitate this online course. I must admit that having had practically no previous experience other than participating in the delivery of webinars for Jisc that I took a week or so to feel really comfortable. The difference with this compared to the Jisc webinars was that the three of us
could see each other and I found that particularly useful in helping to engender dialogue between us.
Some thoughts and observations about the learners
Rachel has provided an overview of the learners. Those who engaged fully with the course completed the weekly tasks and entered into great discussions through the course’s Google Community. It was clear that the learners enjoyed the opportunity to participate both synchronously and asynchronously.
What worked for me
Working with Rachel and Rod was great. I’d got to know Rachel through the JIsc programme, but it quickly became clear that Rod and I shared a common academic background and experiences earlier in our lives. This really helped to bring about the coherence of the course. Whilst at the time I was working at QUB, which as Rachel has indicated was in a different part of the sector from MMU, I had spent the previous 14 years working at another new University in the north of England and was therefore well aware of the working environment that many of the participants were in. Rachel and Rod have asked me to help facilitate again this year!
Being able to engage with colleagues who share my commitment to assessment as well as the learners who by participating in this way indicated that they wanted to know more and benefit from the experience. Having delivered material on assessment to participants who were required to attend for probation is a very different experience. I also found the sharing of experiences particularly valuable - indeed I was able to make use of some of them in the subsequent delivery of the QUB course.
Challenges
Not having worked on the MMU course before and coming to it relatively late was a challenge in itself - as well as my own lack of experience in online learning and facilitation. We did, however, ‘meet’ each week to discuss what we were going to cover and who would do what. I think one of the main challenges was that sometimes enthusiasm would take over during a session and we
might not have covered everything we wanted to. The learners didn’t seem to mind, however.
One of the main challenges I had was delivering some of the sessions in an open plan office. This was alleviated to some extent because the sessions ran over lunchtime and my immediate colleagues would generally go out. Those days when I was able to work from home were easier.
Lessons learned and tips for others
If there is more than one facilitator then getting together to plan the session is a must, particularly if facilitators are from other institutions. I also think there has to be an openness and trust between the facilitators. Although I hadn’t worked very closely with Rachel and Rod previously we were able to build this quite quickly.
Assessment in Higher Education Online Open Course
Rod Cullen
My name is Rod Cullen. I am a senior lecturer in Learning and Teaching Technologies in the Learning Innovation Team at Manchester Metropolitan University. This has been a shared experience with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Anne Jones. Consequently, you will find three contributions in this series that relate to this open course. Inevitably there will be some overlap in our experiences and there is some cross referencing between our reflections. In particular, Rachel and Anne have referred to the introduction and motivation sections in this document as they are common to all of us. We have however, written independent reflections on our experiences of facilitating the course.
Introduction to the course
Assessment in Higher Education is a 15 credit optional unit on the Postgraduate Certificate or Masters in Academic Practice (PGCAP/MAAP) at Manchester Metropolitan University. Having run this unit with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth for many years, exclusively for colleagues at MMU, in 2014 we decided to take the bold step of making it available as a fully online course open to anyone in the UK Higher Education Community and beyond.
To begin with, I think it is important to review the starting point from which the open course was developed. This has had a big impact upon later reflections on the experiences of developing and delivering the online open offering.
Original unit aim and delivery model
The overall aim of the unit is to engage participants in a review of their current assessment practice and facilitate the development of action plans that build on strengths and address any weaknesses
identified. Consequently, the summative assessment is set in the context of the participants’ own practice and provides what is intended to be a tangible and useful output in the form of a revised assessment strategy.
The format and content of the unit have evolved over several years but have generally adhered to a web enhanced, blended learning model. In brief, participants are required to engage in formative online activities, via the institutional VLE (MMU Moodle), that prepare them for activities which take place in weekly face-to-face sessions. The classroom sessions are activity based, with the participants sharing the outputs of their online preparation within small groups and providing comments and advice on each other’s work. The classroom sessions are followed up with additional formative online activities upon which the participants receive individual and personalized feedback that they use in preparation for the following classroom session. This cycle repeats over the duration of the course as shown in Figure 1. The overall approach is similar to that of the flipped classroom.
Figure 1 - Delivery Model for Assessment in Higher Education unit
Although the unit is an accredited part of the PGCAP/MAAP, colleagues at MMU do not have to enrol on the programme to study the unit as part of their continuing professional development (CPD). These colleagues have several options:
• Complete the same assessment as PGCAP/MAAP participants and receive 15 Masters level credits • Complete a CPD record of learning form for use in institutional Professional Development and Review (PDR) • Undertake no formal assessment or record of CPD
Assessment in Higher Education has proved to be very popular in terms of enrolments, has been successful in achieving teaching and learning aims, and has received very good feedback from both participants and external examiners.
Motivation for “opening up” the unit
Rachel and I had been thinking about developing and offering online versions of Assessment in Higher Education and other units on PGCAP/MAAP for some time. This was mainly in response to feedback from participants who thought that attendance at face-to- face sessions could be difficult given that MMU was (at that time) a multi-campus institution and required a lot of time-consuming travel. We were both aware of the open courses offered by Chrissi Nerantzi and colleagues (FDOL and BYOD4L) and I had some first-hand experience as an informal observer of an iteration of BYOD4L early in 2014. I think it is fair to say that we were both a little curious about the idea of an open course. We were also perhaps looking to freshen up the Assessment in Higher Education Unit and challenge ourselves to deliver it in a different way to a different type of audience. In addition, we also felt that this particular unit had something to offer the wider Higher Education community and we hoped that it might provide an opportunity to develop collaborative contributions from expert colleagues at other institutions.
It is also worth pointing out that the timing was good. For an institution of its size, MMU offers a relatively small number (less than 10) of established fully online distance learning (ODL) programmes. However, there is considerable interest in expanding this form of provision from individuals, programme teams, departments and faculties across the institution. Despite significant investment and expertise in providing campus-based blended learning, institutional experience and understanding of fully ODL provision is limited. Repackaging Assessment in Higher Education as a fully online open course seemed like a good opportunity to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with this type of provision.
Rod’s Reflections
Initial challenges
The delivery platform
Our first major challenge related to participant enrolment and the online delivery platform. At MMU, the institutional VLE (MMU Moodle) is integrated closely with the Student Records System (SRS) and other institutional IT infrastructure (Video Streaming Service, Library systems [Taslis Aspire Reading lists, Equalla content repository e.g. exam papers], and Coursework Receipting System). Only students who are formally enrolled via the SRS are subsequently enrolled into the MMU Moodle course areas for the units on their programmes of study and only MMU staff (holders of MMU IT network ID) can be added as tutors. Once enrolled in Moodle, students and tutors have single sign-on access to the other integrated services. From the start, it was clear that we were not going to be able to use the SRS to enrol non-MMU participants on the unit meaning that we would not be able to use MMU Moodle as the delivery platform for the open course.
We decided to make use of a range of freely available online tools to support different aspects of the delivery of the course. This included:
· Setting up a Wordpress site/blog. https://aheo14.wordpress.com/ · This was set up as an open access site. We used it to share the main content and as a communications tools. · Creating a Google + community in which participants could sign up. Our intention was to use this as a communications and collaboration channel. · Use of Twitter hashtag #aheo. We arranged several tweetchat sessions during the course. · Ensuring that participants knew that they could eMail us about any aspects of the course. · Timetabling weekly Webinars (using Adobe Connect). This was actually an afterthought. Our initial intention had been to focus our interactions with participants using the posting and forum tools (text-based) on the Wordpress site and in the Google+ community. However, both Rachel and I had access to Adobe Connect meeting rooms and we felt that it was a good opportunity to do something with a more immediate and personal interaction with the participants.
We shared advice with the participants on contributing and engaging via the Wordpress site: https://aheo14.wordpress.com/contributing/
Teaching & Learning Focus
For obvious reasons the Assessment in Higher Education Unit has previously been set very much in the MMU context. However, we needed to factor in that we were opening the unit up to a wider audience. We decided to run the course over a six-week period constructed around the main stages of an assessment life cycle model that, although developed at MMU, has been adopted as a framework by JISC for its ongoing engagement with the HE community on assessment and feedback practices.
Each week we introduced a new topic in the assessment life cycle and set participants a task to complete and share with the tutors and/or peers for discussion and feedback. This allowed all participants to reflect upon the weekly topic in the context of their own practice in their own institution. Further details of the course structure are on the Wordpress site: https://aheo14.wordpress.com.
Expert colleagues from other institutions were asked to contribute to the course. Dr Anne Jones, who at that time was at Queen’s University Belfast, became a tutor. Gwyneth Hughes and Holly Smith from the Institute of Education in London contributed and supported an activity as guest tutors on the topic of feedback during week 5. These colleagues made a valuable and interesting contribution that I think added some freshness and richness to the course. It also spread the load when it came to providing feedback and supporting participants in the course. Several other colleagues were unable to contribute due to other commitments at the time but expressed an interest in contributing in the future.
Assessment
Despite the changes in the delivery format the unit still needed assessing as a 15-credit option for PGCAP/MAAP participants. In this respect the assessment options and requirements remained the same as in previous versions of the unit for MMU participants.
To manage the formal assessment of the unit for MMU participants we made use of the designated Moodle unit area. We used the area to make the unit handbook and formal assessment brief available to
eligible participants and to set up formal online submissions using Turnitin. Although this worked reasonably well, it did introduce another technology for the MMU participants and we have had some (justifiable) comments that the range of technologies started to get a bit unwieldy for participants.
We did consider allowing non-MMU participants to enrol on the unit for accreditation but due to the tight timeframe there were too many issues around fees and enrolment to resolve before the course began. Ultimately, we decided that the unit would only be available to non-MMU participants for their own personal Continuing Professional Development; they would receive the same formative experiences as MMU participants but would not be able to take the formal summative assessment.
Experiences of delivery
Who participated in the course?
With only a minimal amount of advertising the unit provided to be quite popular. In total 48 participants enrolled, 31 from MMU and 17 from the wider HE community. Of the MMU participants, 19 enrolled for formal accreditation (17 PGCAP/MAAP participants and 2 personal accredited CPD)
I think it is fair to say that the greatest level of engagement and contribution throughout the course was by MMU participants who were taking the unit for accreditation purposes. We received only a handful of formative task submissions from non-MMU participants, whereas MMU participants (particularly those being formally assessed) submitted and received feedback on the majority of the weekly formative tasks. In general, non-MMU participants dipped in and out of the course and their participation was most evident in the weekly webinars, although stats from the Wordpress site suggest that these were frequently viewed by both MMU and non-MMU participants, before, during and after the main delivery of the course. An issue worth noting is that at least one participant was not happy to share his formative work, or indeed any information, via the public forums that we had set up in Google docs. He had perfectly valid reasons for this and we gave him the option of submitting his work and receiving his feedback directly via email. It is also worth noting
that he told us he would have been happy to share his formative work and feedback with other participants had the forum been set up within the formal Moodle unit area as this was more secure.
In terms of summative assessment, all 18 MMU participants enrolled for accreditation submitted assignments. The work was of a high standard and compared well with previous cohorts. We are satisfied that there were no negative impacts of changing the format of the course in this respect.
Reflections on the webinars
I think both Rachel and I were surprised at the way in which Webinars became the focal point of the course. These were generally well attended but again I think it is fair to say that the most regular and consistent attenders were MMU participants. Rachel, Anne and I had regular weekly meetings (in the webinar room) to plan and agree on content and participant activities for the webinars. We used the start of each webinar to review experiences from the previous week’s formative tasks and discuss issues arising from the feedback provided with participants. My feeling is that this really helped to build relationships between the participants as well as fostering ongoing engagement. Overall, I think we used the webinars very effectively to team-teach. At any given time during the webinar one of us would take the lead role as presenter, introducing and choreographing activities while the other two monitored the chat tool and responded to questions directly or drew the lead presenter’s attention to specific questions. The robustness of the Adobe Connect video conferencing tool contributed to the success of the webinar sessions.
Some reflections on points of principle
My role at MMU is primarily in staff development and training in the effective use of institutional technologies for learning, teaching and assessment. In this respect, I have previously, as a point of principle, designed, developed and delivered units (including Assessment and HE) only using technologies that are available to colleagues as part of the MMU standard technology platform. I have always considered that my own teaching provision should provide exemplary use of the technologies available to colleagues on their MMU computers. In
using a wider suite of technologies that are not on the MMU standard platform and outside of the institutional VLE there are some potential issues that I am uncomfortable with. These include:
· All undergraduate teaching at MMU is supported via the institutional VLE. In not using Moodle, we are missing the opportunity to lead by example and give participants an insightful experience of the VLE from the student perspective. · In using non-MMU standard platform technology, we are encouraging participants to adopt inconsistent practices outside of the VLE and this is at odds with institutional desire to improve consistency of provision for students.
I do concede that exposing colleagues to a boarded suite of technologies might help to develop a wider digital literacy but my gut feeling is that from a purely strategic MMU perspective it represents a missed opportunity.
A second point of principle is that MMU employs me to provide staff development and training for MMU staff. I suspect that at some point someone higher up the management chain is going to ask “Why are we paying you to spend time advising and developing staff from other universities”. Although I think that there are good arguments about the value of the collaborative experience and the sharing of knowledge and expertise, from a purely financial point of view, this valid question requires some consideration.
And Finally
I really enjoyed this experience. In particular, I enjoyed the collaboration with colleagues from other institutions, which I think brought some fresh ideas to the unit and broadened the discussion to the wider Higher Education context. It was also interesting to have participants from other UK institutions and Higher Education in other countries sharing their experiences and commenting upon examples. I do think that this allowed MMU participants to think outside of the “MMU box”, although with the small scale of this programme this kind of interaction was limited. Overall, I am still not fully convinced that the way that we utilised non-MMU platform technology was in the best interest of staff development and training for my institution. Building digital literacy is in my experience a question of building confidence, primarily through practice. Using the institutional VLE would have engaged colleagues directly with the tools that they are
required to use with their students. It is a much smaller step to subsequently use these tools in their own teaching. Google docs and Google + are very different from our VLE based tools and I believe that for some colleagues the leap back into the VLE may be too big.
Ideally, in future it will become possible to deliver open courses at MMU using the institutional VLE and associated technologies on the MMU standard platform. This would enable staff to design and deliver open courses that not only broaden their own experience through collaborations and contributions from expert colleagues at other institutions, but also from engagement with a wider national/international audience that broadens learning experience for MMU participants. At the same time, MMU participants would gain important experience of the technological tool kit that they will be expected to use in their own practice.
Rachel’s reflections
Rachel Forsyth
My name is Rachel Forsyth, I work as an academic developer in the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Introduction to the course
Rod has described the course in the previous contribution. The module has existed in one form or another for several years, as part of MMU’s continuing professional development (CPD) offer. It is a 15 credit module (7.5 European Credit Transfer points) at Masters level. I experienced the Flexible, Open and Distance Learning (FDOL) course as a facilitator in early 2014 and Rod and I decided to open up the module more widely. We felt that this would open up discussion about assessment, and give us chances to work with a wider range of people. I was also interested to offer it to our formal institutional Collaborative Partners, as they find it difficult to attend courses on-site. We don’t require their engagement in our CPD programme - they can organise their own CPD - but we wanted to offer a wide range of options.
My facilitator experience
I really enjoyed participating in this course. I felt that it had good pace and levels of challenge for participants. Participation reduced as the weeks continued, but I do expect this from online courses, especially ones like this, which don’t require registration. All of the people who enrolled to complete the assignment did so, and passed, (n=19), so it was effective for those who needed it. In previous occurrences of the course, these would probably have been the only people participating, so anything offered to, and from, others was a bonus, to me. Maybe other participants got what they wanted and moved on.
Some thoughts and observations about the learners
The group was as varied as it might be for any format of this course: they were all teachers in Higher Education, but were from a wide range of discipline areas; they had experience ranging from one year to more than fifteen; some people were thoroughly engaged and others didn’t seem to participate much at all. Website statistics showed that people continued to visit the site until the assignment submission date, about two months following the last webinar.
What worked for me
In terms of my personal reflections, the big bonus for me was working closely with two colleagues. Rod and I do usually facilitate this course together, but we don’t always plan in such a collaborative way. Working with Anne Jones from QUB also brought another dimension to this planning and delivery, as it’s a different type of institution with different approaches to assessment. It really helped to keep the content generic and avoided the temptation to discuss everything in an MMU-centric way.
The same course ran in face-to-face mode earlier in the same academic year. The mark range was almost identical, so there were no apparent differences in quality between the assignments produced by the two cohorts.
Participant evaluation was really positive and several students commented on how practical the knowledge was; this is usually the case for the face-to-face mode as well. The webinar recordings got a lot of views (presumably from people who couldn’t attend live) and several people commented on the value of having them available. I don’t know if website stats have any real meaning here - people may have stumbled across the site through Google searches and only stayed for 5 seconds - but the site has had over 5000 views from 44 different countries.
Working with people from a wider range of institutions, both facilitators and participants. I really enjoyed this. Assessment is a messy kind of topic and there are lots of ‘correct’ answers - an open experience enables people to explore a wider variety of contexts. I enjoyed the tweetchats we had, and they got a wider range of people involved, but they weren’t particularly valued by participants.
Challenges
The online environment has some benefits – mainly, flexibility – but the lack of physical presence is challenging. You can find other ways to create and sustain personal contact, but I always find them more difficult: I guess I miss that face-to-face interaction. I think it’s because responding to people in the classroom is more immediate, and it’s easier to process who’s doing what; with an online course, you have to keep spreadsheets to check that everyone is engaging. I worried about not being responsive enough. I ran my first online course in 1996, so maybe I am just a slow learner!
From a technology point of view, we struggled to find a good solution. Our Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle, would have done pretty much everything we wanted: privacy in the community, file-sharing, peer commenting, archiving, links to reading lists, etc. We weren’t able to give access to the VLE to non-MMU staff, so we had to use open software. That meant that we needed to use Wordpress, Google Drive and Google Communities to get the same effect. One person said “The variety of technologies used was interesting, and provided a rich environment in which to study. Each of the technologies was selected for a specific task, this approach provided genuinely useful tools, but also created an overhead in terms of set up and access.” Not everyone wanted to have a Google account, for instance, or to share their thoughts in a public forum.
Lessons learned and tips for others
Keep the structure really simple. Our course is organised around one question and one task to complete each week. This makes it easier for participants to work out what’s expected, and for it makes the tracking easier for facilitators than if people were doing a wider range of things.
Record and archive everything for people who can’t participate in synchronous events such as webinars and tweetchats. People will look at those records afterwards.
Reflections on the Peer to Peer University (P2PU) ‘Intro to Openness’ Course
Lenandlar Singh
Introduction
I am Lenandlar Singh from Guyana, South America. I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Guyana where I teach computer science and information technology to undergraduate students. In particular I teach Introduction to Programming and object oriented software development. I occasionally teach Management Information Systems to graduate students. I am also the current Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Guyana where I am responsible for teaching, research, and curriculum reviews and development.
In 2014 I was appointed coordinator for an online Bachelor’s Degree in Computing and Information Technology offered by the University of Guyana. This is the first time we will be offering an online degree program. To support this program, I am working with the software development services on at the University of Guyana to develop a Moodle platform to support our online programs. I will also be conducting training for other Faculty on the use of Moodle to deliver online courses.
All of my teaching experiences thus far have been face to face with some support for students facilitated by online social networking tools. My experience supporting online courses is very limited. However, for a many years I have set up online spaces for my students. This is entirely voluntary as there’s no official technology requirement for the courses I teach. These online spaces have provided additional opportunities for me to engage students outside of our face to face context and to learn more about students learning habits in the 21st century.
In particular, I have used Facebook Groups predominantly to facilitate interactions with my face-to-face classes. From these experiences I have presented and published a number of papers, for example (Singh, 2013; Gaffar & Singh, 2012). I have also used another online tool - Peerwise (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/) to engage students and have shared my experiences (Singh, 2014). Occasionally, I use Google Docs for end-of course surveys, class lists generation, assignments development and group formations, and for assigning learning activities to students.
NWOER Experience
This is my first official experience facilitating a course that is entirely online. Thanks to Carol Yeager, I was invited as a facilitator on the NorthWest Open Course on Openness in Education from March 10- 15, 2014. At the outset I was unsure about my own capacity to facilitate. I was very uncertain about my skillset and whether I knew enough about the subject to facilitate. However, the planning process prior to the course was very helpful. The planning committee was very open and supportive. Within the space of a week my confidence level had soared and I was ready to contribute. We agreed collectively on the specific assignments for the week. I was already contributing. I was assigned a co-facilitator to work with on a specific aspect of the course. This helped me focus on my own contribution in the context of the course. As a first time facilitator, being assigned a co-facilitator and a manageable activity definitely worked for me.
This course was hosted by the NWOER http://NorthWestoer.org. I was motivated to join the team of facilitators because Open Education and Open Educational Resources are very core to my practice and I felt this was an opportunity to learn from others while at the same time contribute to the discourse. I was also encouraged to participate because the expected time commitment was minimal and would not have demanded too much of me at the time. In addition, at the time of this course I was actively engaged with Rhizo14 - a MOOC on Rhizomatic Learning that was facilitated by Dave Cormier (https://p2pu.org/en/courses/882/rhizomatic-learning- the-community-is-the-curriculum/). In fact, I believe I was recruited as a facilitator for NWOER because of my participation in Rhizo14.
Social Media Channels
This course mainly used three external channels for participants - Facebook, Twitter and G+. Twitter was by far the most commonly used with the hashtags #nwoer and #nwoerchat. The Facebook Group and G+ Community were fairly active but with a small number of participants. An important lesson here is that it’s important to allow participants to work with the backchannels or tools they are most comfortable with or familiar. In this particular experience, some participants preferred G+ over Facebook Group. The Facebook Group was particularly useful for facilitators as it supported discussions around the planning of the course. Much of the ongoing planning activities were discussed in this group. I rarely engaged the G+ community. I am from a developing country and bandwidth is an issue. At home access to the G+ community was a major challenge mainly because of poor internet connectivity. However, Facebook and Twitter were much more accessible and used.
Standout Experiences
Open Course Mashup
Two things stand out for me in this course and contributed significantly to my own learning and professional development. The idea that an existing course serve as the base for a particular context because it is openly available is an interesting proposition for online education. The NWOER network re-created a course from the existing course on open education available on the https://p2pu.org/ website. This one week course was tailored to the time available and around perceived interest of the course participants. The one week course was re-organised and hosted by the http://northwestoer.org/ website. The full course was also available on the at P2PU (see https://p2pu.org/). Secondly, that a new course could be spawned around and extend the concepts of an existing body of content is an opportunity to focus on further core issues around the existing course. NWOER was not designed to teach any of the content from the P2PU open course. Discussions around the topics formed the core of the course. So while it would have been useful to engage the material before, participants were not expected to complete any of the reading by any particular time. The flexible nature of the course allowed participants to decide with what they wanted to engage. In
this sense, the NWOER course provided a framework for engagements around OERs and not necessarily a course on OERs. This approach was obviously needed for such a short course. The time to decide on course content is shortened when much of the context and structure is already available. However, it also signalled to participants that they were free to participate however they wish.
In terms of the architecture of open courses, it is important that there exists a central point of focus even if it is expected that most of the engagement for the course takes place in other spaces. A central space for an online course provides the repository for materials if the course has a core set of materials. More importantly, for open courses where participants are likely to engage in their own social spaces, a central location makes it easy to aggregate and share links to those spaces, curate resources for current and future iterations. The use of a central hub for course activities to be linked is useful especially for beginners and those who are not well acquainted with the ways of the social web as it acts as a safe hub and central point of navigation around course activities.
This course and the experiences from it demonstrate the potential values of open courses, open content and open learning. In this particular case the core principles of open practices made it possible for a network of learners to re-create a course around a core topic efficiently, and at the same time one that was tailored to a particular learning context. This NWOER course is a good demonstration of the real value of an Open Course and Open Educational Resources.
Tweetchats
The second experience that stood out for me was the preparation that went into a chat session on Twitter facilitated by Kathrine Jensen and myself. In the week leading up to our chat session we outlined and discussed a range of questions collaboratively using a Google Doc. After much consideration and in keeping with our theme “What is Open Education all about?”, we agreed on the following list of questions:
Q1. What does openness and open education mean to you? Q2. Why does openness matter? Q3. What/How/Where do you share?
Q4. How can we become more Open (in our practice or sharing our learning?) Q5. Do you use Open Source Software? Please give details of what tools/platforms you use. Q6. What stops people from sharing their work? What are the benefits of sharing?
At this stage my co-facilitator and I arranged a Skype session to decide on a ‘protocol’ to conduct our tweetchat. We spent approximately one hour discussing our approach and eventually settled on this arrangement - that one of us would ask the questions and keep track of the time allotted to explore each question while the other would follow the conversation, respond to questions and comments from participants, and keep the chat session flowing. This preparation worked really well as we managed the chat session very efficiently as the conversation flowed from one question to another.
While I am a regular participant of various tweetchats, I was never a facilitator. I was generally unaware of the challenges associated with the preparation of a tweetchat session and the requirements for its efficient conduct. Many tweetchats are generally facilitated by one person with participants contributing to the question pool, discussions and the general flow. This is usually spontaneous but could be planned beforehand. From this experience, I believe it helps to have a co-facilitator right from the outset. Pre-chat preparations are key. The identification of questions beforehand is also very important as it allows for flow and direction of the chat session. An agreement on a general chat protocol for the conduct of the session helps with its efficient management. In terms of the breadth of discourse for a one- hour chat session, it appears as though a list of five to six questions is just about right. At the end of our chat session, we used Storify to capture the entire session. Storify helps to archive the conversation and as a means of review for those who might have missed the session.
Summary
Overall, the NWOER course facilitated the development of networks among participants, albeit on a small scale. This is perhaps the best element of the course as learning and sharing among facilitators and participants continue to beyond the end of the course. This course also demonstrated how it might be possible to source facilitators with
common interests from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. The experiences of this course could serve as a useful model for professional development of online course facilitators. However, an element of planning is necessary in order to successfully bring all of the course elements together.
References
Gaffar, K., & Singh, L. (2012). Supporting Computer Science Education Using Web 2.0 and Social Software: Students and Lecturers’ Usage and Perception. Journal of Arts Science and Technology, 5(1), 65-91.
Singh, L. (2014). Technology Enhanced Peer Learning with PeerWise: Students Experiences and Perception from a Developing Country. Caribbean Teaching Scholar, 4(1), 5-22.
Singh, L. (2013). Guided Assessment or Open Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Students’ Interactions on Facebook Groups. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 14(1), 35-43.
Facilitator’s Reflections on P2PU ‘Intro to Openness’ Course
Peter Reed
Peter Reed is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, taking a specific view on Technology Enhanced Learning within the Faculty of Health and Life Science. Some of his key interests include Open Education and the use of Social Media in Higher Education. He is the current co-chair of the UK Blackboard Medical Education Special Interest Group, and a steering group member of both the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) North West Special Interest Group and the North West Open Educational Resources Network.
My experience in Learning Technology includes work on so many different projects across four Higher Education Institutions in the North West of England, including work as a Learning Technologist, Project Coordinator and Lecturer. I’m currently employed as a Lecturer with a particular focus on Learning Technology, within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Liverpool.
This range of experience has identified a plethora of interests through working with many colleagues to introduce various technologies to their teaching, as well as my own - both in the classroom and online. Throughout this experience, two of the most significant areas impacting upon my own research and practice have been:
The potential for Open Educational Resources (OER) to impact on learning and teaching, and in particular, the reciprocity of sharing materials, preventing the ‘reinventing of the wheel’ and associated recurring cost. I’m also particularly interested in the engagement of academic staff with this ‘movement’; and their attitudes, motivations and barriers to participation;
The role and impact social media can have on learning and teaching, including its role in the increasingly blurred boundaries between formal and informal learning. I’m interested in which tools students use; if they use those tools to discuss University work; and their views on communicating with faculty via those channels.
Being a committee member for the North West OER Network brought my experience in both aspects into focus, through the suggestion to facilitate an online course, not all dissimilar to the increasingly popular Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The aim of this initiative was to facilitate an existing, open course developed by open-guru David Wiley as part of Open Education Week. The course was hosted on the P2PU platform, and facilitated via social media, including Twitter.
As the start date approached, I was increasingly cognisant of other aspects surrounding learning and teaching. For example, whenever I consider the introduction of various technologies, I think about the digital literacies of learners to effectively engage. Normally this is in response to Undergraduate or Postgraduate students, but on this occasion we didn’t know who would be participating. For some time, Prensky’s notion of Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives (2001) has dominated this discussion, suggesting the youth of today have grown up with innate digital literacies akin to speaking a native language. However, recent times have seen increasing skepticism and alternative typologies to describe learners. Most notably, White and Le Cornu’s less-harsh metaphor of Visitors and Residents (2011) is attracting attention. This suggests that users of the web sit somewhere along a continuum between Residents and Visitors. Residents leave a significant trace of themselves online, and see web spaces akin to physical locations; Visitors leave much less trace online, and are likely to use particular tools only for particular tasks.
Where would the participants of this open course sit?
Well to some degree, our course would be facilitated via Twitter or Facebook, and as such required some ‘know-how’ e.g. the use of hashtags in tweets. These are spaces and tasks unlikely to be frequented or familiar to ‘Immigrants’ or ‘Visitors’, and with little
induction to such environments, I wondered how many people would immediately be dissuaded to participate. Are they our target demographic anyway? What could we have done to prepare participants more effectively? Do we, as facilitators, owe such an induction to would-be participants? The questions continue...
As the course started, participants from across the globe engaged. Facilitators devised a number of questions - between 4-6 with the intention of progressing every 10-15 minutes. How difficult can it be to facilitate a 60 minute discussion?
It wasn’t until the evening of my facilitation that I realised just how hectic things were from this angle. I regard social theories of learning highly in my own personal philosophy, but I didn’t expect it to influence me nearly as much as it did! I was the facilitator - seemingly the specialist - asking the questions and provoking thought amongst participants, and yet the range of responses merely made me look into topics in more detail myself, and through different lenses. The topic was Open Educational Practices, which I co-facilitated with Sue Beckingham. We asked easier questions to get started, encouraging participants to reflect on their experiences with OERs and MOOCs, but the questions quickly escalated to tease out barriers to engaging, as well as ideas around unbundling content from the Institution - potentially areas of uncertainty.
At the end of the hour, I was out of breath. My mind was racing with the various simultaneous conversations I was engaged in. I had various Twitter clients open to monitor my own mentions, as well as those tweets that were using the hashtag - #NWOERCHAT. I took a deep breath and headed over to the Google Spreadsheet I’d previously set up, based on some great work from Martin Hawksey. His ‘TAGS Explorer’ requires minimum setup time and little technical knowledge in order to quickly visualise a network, which in this case, was based around the hashtag. It was complex - a range of ‘nodes’ dispersed broadly around the edges, with a huge cluster of connected nodes, representing the dialogue amongst the community. Even to the relatively untrained eye, I knew this was amazing! The buzz and hype surrounding the xMOOCs from Coursera, Udacity and FutureLearn has personally left me underwhelmed. But this is something completely different!
Figure 1. Network Diagram visualising participation in tweetchats using #NWOERCHAT
This network diagram was representative of the overall diagram for the week (figure. 1). There were so many tweets sent during the course of the tweetchats - thousands - that I just couldn’t get my head around it all. It was such a unique experience. As I write this account, I’m still staggered by this experience, and wonder how and where this could be introduced to the formal education that we work in on a daily basis. Could this be the future of the traditional, and often dusty, cobwebbed online discussion forum? The immediacy of the experience was just like having conversations and being in the same room as these people, except they were massively geographically dispersed. From Liverpool to London, to Georgetown, Guyana, to Cairo, Egypt. Truly Global!
But what about those Digital Immigrants and Visitors? What about those outside of the Open Education field? What about those who don’t use Twitter and Facebook?
Did they engage much?
I suppose we’ll never know. Whilst this open course left a huge crater in my own expectations, my thoughts, and my experience of online learning and teaching, I suppose we never even left a dimple on so
much of the educational landscape. Surely there is more we can do with Open Education to enable others to have this experience as well?
Again as I look back, this opportunity married my two key interests perfectly - OER and Social Media. The OER we used as the basis for content delivery was the stimulus for such rich dialogue, and I carry this experience with me as I look to develop my own teaching.
I would urge others to engage in such experiences. If you’re new to participating, then don’t be scared to shout out for help (use Caps Lock if you need to!). If you’re new to facilitating a course like this, then buckle up because you’re in for one hell of a ride!
References
Prensky, M (2001). ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1’. On the Horizon, 9 (5), pp 1-6.
White, D. and Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: a new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16 (9). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewA rticle/3171/3049
Facilitating the Community as Curriculum in Open Education
Carol Yeager
Background and prior facilitation experiences
I have been a faculty member and mentor with the State University of New York for more than 30 years. As a lifelong learner with a MFA Education, I recently earned a MS degree in Creativity and Change Leadership from SUNY/Buffalo State. Currently, online global and open learning is of particular interest for my research and practice.
The majority of my experience in the past 20 years has been with online learning, as both a facilitator of Higher Education (HE) learning and as a student of learning. As a course developer (using this terminology as evidence of how long I have been in the “business of education”) as well as learning facilitator (teaching faculty), I have been strongly influenced by the words attributed to Alvin Toffler:
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
As a lifelong learner, I have always explained to students that I expect to learn as much, if not more, through them, as they will learn through me. And so, I have always considered myself as a learning facilitator on a two way street of learning, unlearning and relearning. Having worked with the Learning Management System (LMS) in several different iterations and varieties as well as a few more open platforms such as Moodle, I am always eager to learn of more integrated and engaging methods of learning and facilitating learning.
More recently my interests have broadened to include global open education venues that incorporate opportunities for more collaborative learning. Borrowing from an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others.” The opportunity to spend a week with people who have vested interests in education is a prime example of working together and going farther than if one gives a summary of what Open Education portends. The
experience of being in an open education course opens the potential for more co-facilitation and collaboration as global circumstances and opportunities evolve. As global technology and innovations speed ever faster, I wish to go far in sharing learning and learning opportunities. In the past I have been in global education, specifically Greece and the Middle East with blended learning and most recently MOOCs … as a student and as a developer/facilitator. This opportunity expanded those initial horizons.
Spending two years as a student/participant in a number of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) gave me some familiarity and practice with open and distributed learning. It seems to me that life is its own cMOOC (connectivist MOOC as a networked and distributed learning environment) and that type of learning is life and that for me, life is learning.
Combining the elements of the more formal degree disciplines with my own lifelong learning, Open Education, cMOOCs and my PLN (Personal Learning Network), the 2011 Creativity and Multicultural Communication (CMC11) was launched under the aegis of SUNY/Empire State College as a credit and non-credit learning option. It is still somewhat active (although not as a credit bearing option), most particularly via its Facebook group, and on occasion, with folks who just want to play in the CMC11 sandbox. The success of this experiment is documented in an article in the OLC (Online Learning Consortium) Journal and has, unfortunately, recently been placed behind a pay wall. I have since designed and co-facilitated two additional cMOOCs for SUNY/Empire State College: VizMath and Metaliteracy MOOC.
If we look at the community as the driving factor in the curriculum of the cMOOC (Downes, 2013), then the facilitator is both a learning facilitator and a learner. Most recently I have been a participant in the globally offered Peer to Peer University (P2PU) course Rhizomatic Learning. While the underlying platform is P2PU, the community is the driving factor for the curriculum. When the initial 10 week slot for the course ended, a number of the participants decided to continue with a new topic/question each succeeding week. The topic was crowd sourced with the remaining participants. From this experience a number of interesting initiatives have evolved with participants collaborating on a number of projects, such as: a self-facilitated continuation of the course by some of the participants; two separate
research projects that are crowd sourced as part of the research sourcing; a new weekly EdTechTalk Q&A broadcast addressing education questions; collaboration on several conference presentations: and new participants joining the ongoing “uncourse”. This is a prime example of the facilitative opportunities of a community as the curriculum.
Experience and reflections from personal North West OER Education Week facilitation
The NWOER course was conceived as an exercise for facilitators and others as a community for professional development. As such, it offered an opportunity for a wide range of educators to work with social media in an open environment and further develop their PLN and additional online communication skills. The foundation for facilitating this community as curriculum developed out of a myriad of experiences brought to the “course” by the expertise and various experiences of the participating facilitators.
Chrissi Nerantzi was a participant in the CMC11 cMOOC and quickly became an integral part of my own PLN. We have collaborated on several occasions and when she invited me to be one of the facilitators for NWOER Open Education Week, I readily accepted. I always enjoy new and varied experiences with open and global education so this was a perfect opportunity to step into another global venue. In the process of inviting co-facilitators, my colleague from the SUNY/ESC cMOOC projects (Betty Hurley-Dasgupta of the US) as well as a PLN colleague (Lenander Singh of Guyana) from Rhizo14 were recruited by me for NWOER Open Ed Week. The community of collaboration expanded and became the core of the new facilitation adventure for a community as curriculum. Admittedly, this endeavor was a slight bit more directed than others I have worked in, as it was launched on a previously developed course and platform. As such, the curriculum potentially had a distinct outline, although the participants were free to select topics they wanted to follow, or not. This was a very good example of a Self-Oriented Learning Environment (SOLE) where the community of learners develop the curriculum according to their optional needs and wants of what to follow in order to create a flow of learning experiences.
As the week progressed, it became apparent that the participants (community of learners) engaged more through the social media than
the P2PU stand-alone “course” platform. Social media consisting primarily blog posts, Google+ discussions, Twitter and Hangouts became the curriculum building venues … developed by the community as an expansion of and sometimes a deviation from the originally suggested P2PU curriculum. The most active venues, with the most participants, were the daily tweetchat sessions. It was here that we observed more exchanges of ideas and a more obvious PLN development. Granted, the majority of those engaged (participants and facilitators) are intrinsically involved in the education arena as students, researchers or faculty. This means that self-directed learning (SOLE) is not as big a leap of faith as it might be for the non- initiated. Hence, the week went smoothly and the pace was in a state of perpetual “flow”. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) The experience was stimulating and opened the door to new thinking as well as meeting new thinkers with whom to collaborate and add to one’s Personal Learning Network (PLN). This was the added value for me, and I suspect was the same for the other participants and facilitators. Expanding my horizons and engaging in a global network of learning is the core of my own lifelong learning goal. One of the major takeaways of the NWOER week was the self-actualization of the potentials of Open Education Week for each of the participants. It would have been interesting to engage more traditional students in the course for the week, if only to find out how easily they could follow our self-initiated learning styles. Who were the other participants and where did they come from? How many lurkers (non engaging participants) were there? What did they gain from watching from the “outside?
A few concluding thoughts
One of the challenges, from my perspective, is finding solid incubation time in the faster-paced, more intensive learning endeavors. Time for deeper reflection of the learning is not always available. Certainly, blog posts offer some opportunity for reflection, and yet, there does not seem to be enough time to “bake” the reflective thinking and it tends to come out “microwaved”… at least in my own experience.
The NWOER week found that social media in the forms of Tweets, Hangouts and Google + and Facebook postings and discussion were
filled with expanded thinking and activity. It really seemed to be a learning event by and for facilitators that helped them further develop their own skills and understanding of an open education setting.
As we facilitated the specific daily tweetchat sessions for NWOER Open Education Week (Reed & Nerantzi, 2014), I found myself wondering if we started with one specific opening question for each session, could we then let the session evolve out of some of the replies and participant generated questions. Additional questions could be held in abeyance in case the conversation lags and needs impetus. This leads back to my thinking about learning where the community is the curriculum. One can always have additional leading questions “in the wings” and still leave the door open for more flow among the participants. The facilitation focus is then upon supporting the learners and learning rather than directing or molding the content thus allowing the questions to shape the direction and engagement. This allows questions to flow out of discussions and tweets rather than trying to get prepared materials “covered”. From my perspective, learning involves developing more complex questions rather than seeking a satisfactory “answer”. There are generally many possible answers, depending upon one’s needs and perspective. Perhaps this sort of learning venue would serve as a basis for professional development topics. The non-linear process would offer educators the opportunity to practice communication in the social media venues and serve as a model for deeper connections with their students in their other teaching/learning facilitation courses. Facilitation of educators by educators might enable all to develop their skills and gain a deeper understanding for open education in their own practice.
This takes practice and a willingness to cede control of the venue … a difficult task for most of us who have come through the traditional schooling modes.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the NWOER Open Education Week initiative and hope to be engaged in many additional initiatives in online open education as they become available and/or are initiated by the facilitators and participants in this NWOER Open Education Week and beyond. The network that developed has potential for further explorations.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial
Downes, S. (2013). Connective Knowledge and Open Resources: available at http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.UK/2013/10/connective- knowledge-and-open-resources.html [accessed 9 October 2015]
Reed, P. & Nerantzi, C. (2014). Tweet-chats: the new ‘condensed’ synchronous discussion forum? In C. Nerantzi and S. Beckingham (Eds.). Using social media in the social age of learning, Lifewide Magazine, Special Edition, June 2014, pp. 13-16. Available at http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/uploads/1/0/8/4/10842717/magazi ne_10_june_2014.pdf [accessed 9 October 2015]
My story as an open facilitator
Mina Sotiriou
A little bit about me
For the last ten years I have been working in Higher Education and have built up a diverse portfolio of responsibilities, including teaching; creation of e-Learning material; designing and delivering staff development; developing courses based on established guidelines and quality standards for eLearning content.
Currently I am working at University College London (UCL) as a Senior Teaching Fellow and when participated in the FDOL I was an Instructional Designer (ID). My ID role involved working closely with teaching staff to adapt and develop their teaching materials for online delivery of professional development and short courses. I advised on, and developed learning and assessment activities, provided support for the development, running and evaluation of courses. Prior to that, I worked as an eLearning Facilitator at Hull York Medical School and as a VLE Officer at University of Leeds.
My academic background is in the area of Information and Communications studies in which I hold a PhD. I have a great interest in learning technologies and I am always looking for opportunities to learn more and be surprised!
How did you feel about FDOL?
I guess that for some people the experience of being thrown into the unknown world of online collaborative learning, can be a daunting one. That was my experience too when I joined FDOL 132 as a student. I felt overwhelmed and confused with the complexities of too many new tools, accounts, areas to participate, collaborate, reflect, discuss, question and write. It took me a couple of weeks to get my head round and only after asking many questions and navigating through every link available, I managed to figure out what I am supposed to do.
My FDOL student journey, although overwhelming at first, was really worthwhile. I felt fortunate I had the opportunity to discover the open online world and share the experience with both facilitators and moderators. As a result, I wanted to give something back to the online community as well as carry on enjoying learning. For these reasons therefore, I was quite happy and thankful to be offered the opportunity to become a facilitator in the FDOL141 course.
The group I was responsible for started with four participants but after two weeks into the course another member joined. Four members of the group were engaging on a weekly basis and the fifth member, although he was contributing regularly, he was unable to work on a collaborative basis for most of the tasks.
In the first week of the course, my co-facilitators and I organised a hangout where everybody had the opportunity to introduce themselves 'live’ and also ask questions. What became apparent to me, was that similar to my own experience, the group also seemed to feel quite confused. Specifically, their questions were related to weekly activities and tools as well as work planning organisation both as a micro-group i.e. FDOL group 2, and macro-group within the whole FDOL community. In the days to follow, my co-facilitators and I were trying to ensure that participants felt supported and guided. As it was expected (and hoped), the initial feeling of confusion soon disappeared. In the weeks to follow, the group worked towards common learning goals (Brindley et al, 2009), its members appeared to be very comfortable participating, collaborating, exploring, engaging, and sharing, and the work they produced on a weekly basis was very interesting and thorough.
My facilitator experience
My facilitator experience in an online Problem Based Learning, PBL, course (Hmelo-Silver & Barrows, 2006) prior to the FDOL course, was non-existent. Although I was aware of the PBL pedagogical theory and I had facilitated online discussions in blended learning courses, I never actually acted as an online facilitator in an open course. I felt fortunate therefore, that I was co-facilitating with two other experienced colleagues, one of whom was the co-creator of the FDOL course and the other, was about to conduct her own online course.
Amongst ourselves, we agreed to manage our time and our responsibilities based on our availability. What we did not agree though, was a common approach to facilitation. As mentioned earlier, all three of us had different experiences in online learning and therefore different approaches.
My approach was based primarily on my experience as a FDOL student. In that capacity, I had the opportunity to experience what it feels to be a student in an online collaborative course and how important it is to have a clear structure and objectives.
As such, what I achieved in my first week as a facilitator, was to guide the learners in their initial interaction with the course and also to create a friendly and social environment in order to promote learning during the course. Over the duration of the course, I was constantly monitoring all the group entries, making comments and encouraging the discovery of new ways and tools of presentation.
Thoughts and observations about the learners
As mentioned above, the group was formed of five members, four of whom were more active. The fifth member, although a very keen learner and explorer, was quite restricted in his participation as he was experiencing technological and space issues. His story was most interesting and revealing for me as it allowed me to perceive his reality. His world was not one but two. In one of them the internet was not a given.
What the group managed to achieve was to merge the two worlds together and produce something that was representative of all. In the meantime, it also reinforced my opinion that reality is subjective and is in the eyes of the beholder.
What worked for me
On reflection, I can say that my first experience as an online facilitator was quite rewarding and rich. The fact that I was working with a quite motivated and friendly group, and the course had run before so changes were made based on the participants views, added value to the way I felt. The question is, had I worked with a different group in a course running for the first time would I still feel the same?
I quite often think of this question from the facilitator’s point of view and I come to the conclusion that in order to promote a high level of learning satisfaction (a subjective attribute really) in an online course based on group collaboration all the following elements need to be in place:
• group members need to have learning motives (personal and external) which will allow them to create: • strong group dynamics enhanced by: • a supportive environment and a tutor who is able to: • develop a course with a clear learning design which offers students: • opportunities for personal and skill development
Challenges I experienced and values for me personally
Overall I would not say that I experienced many challenges and probably I would not even define them as challenges. They were rather concerns. In particular I wondered: am I doing the right thing? Should I pose more questions? Do people enjoy and learn? Although I do not still have the answers to all these questions, I have been told by the group members that they enjoyed the experience and I would like to believe them!
I believe the biggest value an online open course can offer, is the shared learning experience. I have learned as much, or even more, from all the participants in the course as I hope they learned from me. It is a personal journey of engagement, discovery and observation of people, society and ourselves which I hope that made me a better educator and learner.
Lessons learnt and tips for others
I thoroughly believe that my FDOL student experience gave me a unique understanding of the students’ needs and as a consequence allowed me to become a better facilitator. This is because it has helped me identify what worked well or not, where additional support is needed, what are the issues working as a group online and more importantly, what is the role of the facilitator.
Therefore, I would strongly recommend to anyone who would like to be a facilitator, to first register to an online open course as a student and get a feel for it. Whatever the experience is, positive or negative,
take your time to reflect on the process and think how you can make your course better for your students. Ask your students to tell you what they think and would like to have and be willing to make changes to suit your students and the course.
References
Brindley, J. E., Walti, C. & Blaschke, L. M.(2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 10 (3). Available at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271 [accessed 18 May 2014]
Hmelo-Silver, C. E. & Barrows, H. S. (2006). Goals and Strategies of a Problem-based facilitator. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem- based Learning. 1 (1). Available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=i jpbl [accessed 18 May 2014]
Refining Flexible, Bite- Sized Open Education for Work Based Learners
Colin Gray
Colin Gray is an online educator teaching a range of subjects, from Podcasting to Moodle. He researches how to make online learning more effective for work based learners, particularly staff in Higher Education and entrepreneurs in small business. An unlikely pairing, he realises. Colin can be found at ThePodcastHost.com, TELTeacher.com or tweeted at @elearningcolin.
Introduction: Reaching Work Based Learners
I have filled a varied range of roles throughout my working life, but a common strand throughout is the act of facilitation.
In the distant past I worked as a corporate team-building facilitator, attempting to convince busy and inconvincible executives that soft skills actually are worth the time to learn. Later, as a web designer, I created business focussed websites, the success of which relies heavily on the facilitation of teams, their aims and how they work together to make a business run. Eventually, in education, I facilitated workshops and seminars aimed at developing staff in technology enhanced learning, first face to face, and then increasingly online.
Today, my work has evolved into developing, delivering and researching open online work based learning. I work as an online facilitator in two sectors which most people think of as almost polar opposites: education and small business. I’ve found over the past 12 months, however, that they have a lot in common. Perhaps more than either would like to admit.
The focus of my work is on developing effective short-form, online methods for professional development. This involves two strands:
1. Developing short online courses which consist of daily bite-sized segments of information/activity.
2. Facilitating iterative runs of these courses, during which I refine both the content and facilitation style based on feedback from learners.
This work emerged from a great deal of feedback which stated that academics often struggled to take part in face to face professional development. The key barrier, unsurprisingly, was time. Sessions would be scheduled only once or twice per semester. If an academic wanted to take part, there was a very good chance they would have teaching or other commitments at that time. This led to my research into delivering ‘bite sized’ and online work based learning of which the key attribute is flexibility.
In terms of grounding, work based learning is an established area. The common attribute of all work-based learners is that aforementioned “busy schedule”. Nie, Armellini, Witthaus and Barklamb (2011) describe work-based learners as time poor, often travelling and benefitting from access to flexible, perhaps mobile, learning in order to continue professional development. Brennan (2005) has also emphasised the benefits of time and location flexibility in order to encourage work-based learners to take part and succeed.
A further influence of this research is the work of Lave and Wenger on learning communities (Lave & Wenger, 1991). I believe that online learning works best when a social aspect is present, allowing knowledge exchange and peer support throughout, and diminishing the feeling of isolation that is often reported by online learners. Therefore, social tasks are built into the ‘bite sized’ format throughout.
Introducing a ‘Bite Sized’ Methodology
It has been established that flexibility is a major advantage in work- based learning. To this end, I have been testing open access, short- form, ‘bite sized’ learning interventions. This involves the conversion of half day or full day workshops into fully online experiences. For a facilitator, this translates to a 1 week, flexibly run course in lieu of a half-day workshop, and a 2 week bite-sized course in place of a full day of facilitation. These courses have been advertised openly to
both education and business, and have now been run with more than 200 individuals.
The approach follows a daily delivery format. The facilitator provides a small chunk of teaching every day, hence the ‘bite sized’ moniker. These short tasks, often around 30 minutes, can be completed by the students any time during the day, and can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. The facilitator can choose their own schedule, checking in at various points throughout the day, answering questions in their own time.
The key components of the tasks to be facilitated include one work- based exercise and one social task. The work-based exercise requires the participant to complete a task within their own work, based on the learning points of the day. This approach borrows from Knowles (2011) theory of andragogy which states that adult learners engage much more with learning which is based in a real-world context, and for which there are obvious benefits to their work. The social task would normally lead on from this, requiring the learner to report back on progress, and tell the facilitator and group something about their approach.
For example, on ‘The Podcasting Teacher’ course, during one task learners are required to script out a Podcast episode for their students. They are also required to feedback to the group what their aims for the podcast are; what they want to achieve with the podcast that would enhance the overall classroom experience. This then stimulates discussion amongst the group about aims for the activity.
Currently, I am facilitating these courses on 2 platforms:
1. TELTeacher.com - a website aimed at education professionals, intending to deliver technology enhanced learning professional development 2. LearnDEn.com - a website aimed at small businesses in the UK, intended to help them develop digital marketing, web technology and media skills in order to grow their business.
Both TELTeacher and LearnDEn are open platforms. Anyone can register and take these courses for free thanks to research funding from both Abertay University and the AHRC1.
1 Arts and Humanities Research Council
I ran my first fully online course in 2012, and I have run close to 30 courses since then for a combined total of around 40 weeks of facilitation. Every course has been different in many ways, but there have also been a number of commonalities. All but one of these courses I have facilitated alone and so I have been able to keep tight control over the variables and ensure that I’m evolving my practice over time. Later in this article I’ll discuss my experiences with these courses in detail, including what I think others can learn from my solo approach.
Who Are the Learners?
The learners on these courses fall into two camps:
● Academic staff, both teaching and support
● Business owners and employees in very small companies.
Other than their association by career choice, the learner groups tend to be hugely varied, not least in terms of technical expertise.
As stated previously, the theme of “Technology Enhanced...” runs throughout every course I run, whether it refers to enhancing teaching or business practice. This means that experience and confidence with technology are two of the most effecting factors in terms of each student’s base level.
The large majority of my students start on the lower end of the technology spectrum, although there are exceptions. This is understandable since the courses are generally considered “beginners guides”.
A more positive trait these learners have in common is their enthusiasm and positivity - the social experience on each course is unfailingly upbeat, and peer support is omnipresent.
On the other hand, another common factor in each course is the high drop-out rate. Positivity and enthusiasm exudes from every contributing learner, but there are many that don’t contribute at all. This proportion remain lurkers throughout, and many do not complete the full complement of daily activities. Similarly, many learners who begin the course enthusiastically also fail to complete the course.
Because of this trend, retention and engagement are the foci of my research into online, open work based learning.
How I Have Evaluated the Courses
The core aim of my evaluation style is to test a new or evolving method on each course, evaluate its success and improve or abandon it for testing on the next run. I find this iterative, action research based method is very effective in developing both a facilitators skills and the methods they use to deliver a course.
The first stage of evaluation is by survey. Everyone who takes part in one of my courses is asked twice to complete an evaluation form. Response rates vary, but are mostly above 50% and sometimes as high as around 80% after the second request.
Recently, I’ve started collecting more detailed feedback in the form of interviews. This is with the intention of delving a little deeper into what elements of the facilitation style and really evoked positive or negative emotions.
To add to the qualitative data, I also collect learning analytics on learner activity. These analytics inform a mixed methods approach, comparing what users say they do with what they actually do, and monitoring engagement throughout. This allows me to assess facilitation style, methods, activity types and other variables for their effect on engagement.
I find that the combination of analytics and qualitative data create a powerful mix. The output highlights what parts of a facilitator’s contribution have a positive and negative impact, allowing an enhancement of practice over time. I believe that the same techniques could be applied very effectively to almost any course.
Facilitating Alone: The Rise of Online Solo Teachers
As mentioned earlier, all but one or two of my courses I have facilitated alone. This, I believe, puts my approach in a very small minority, with the majority of online courses facilitated by teams. I predict that solo, fully online courses will become much more common in future, however. More teaching will move online as time progresses, both in higher education and in the business world, and much of it will exist in the form of smaller courses, moving away from the ailing MOOC format.
Solo facilitation is certainly a double-edged sword, and in this section I hope that my experience may help others who intend to follow the
same approach. I will highlight the pros and cons, as I see them, and offer advice from my own context that should aid in others.
Why Choose to be a Solo Facilitator?
The main advantage of solo facilitating, to me, is that I can maintain tight control over the variables. I can test teaching methods and know, by the end of an experiment, exactly what went into the test. This can lead to great, and accurate, insights into possible improvements to my facilitation style.
Another advantage is that, like my course style, I can remain very flexible. Working alone, without a team, I have no-one to consult when I choose to entirely change an element of the course, or the way it is run. On numerous courses I have spotted a difficulty, normally thanks to student feedback, and I have immediately and dramatically changed the approach based on that.
A further advantage results from the fact that, as a sole facilitator, it’s very easy to keep a strand of conversation going throughout a course. I have responded to every question, every discussion posting, and so I know the thought processes each student is going through. This has, on numerous occasions, led to breakthroughs when we have managed to tie together various strands of thinking, reaching threshold concepts as a result. Certainly this isn’t impossible on a larger course, but I do believe that the holistic view a solo facilitator develops serves as a very useful tool in all conversations with students.
An effect that leads on from that above is that students have less ability to hide within a course. It’s easy for a participant to believe that they won’t be noticed by 2 or 3 facilitators who are all handling various parts of the course: “They’ll just think someone else has dealt with me, won’t they?” And to an extent, that’s true. When facilitating a course alone, it’s very obvious when someone isn’t joining in. You know that if YOU haven’t talked to them, then no-one has.
One advantage for single facilitators, but phrased as a disadvantage to multiple facilitators is the following: I do believe that more man hours per student are put into the facilitation of a course when more than one person is facilitating.
There are two reasons for this belief, beyond the obvious planning and consulting time required for two or more people: 1. It’s necessary
to read the other facilitator’s answers to maintain a continuous thread throughout the course. 2. Explanations are repeated to reflect personal experience.
On the first, it’s very difficult to make constructive contributions without having read the entirety of a group discussion. Facilitators, by nature of their role, will contribute a great deal to any discussion. Therefore it’s no small task to read the contributions of your fellow facilitators.
On the second, when I answer a question, I can then refer others to that answer, knowing, firstly that it exists, and in detail what it contains. With two or more facilitators, even when that facilitator has read your answer and can refer to it, they’ll often feel the need to put their own spin on the material. More often, in my experience, you want to write your own answer, feeling it a ‘cop-out’ simply referring to another resource.
During the sole course in which I was a joint facilitator, these problems became quite clear to me. Even with planning and delegation, there was a great deal of repetition that seemed difficult to avoid. In the next section, I will outline the ideas that we started to develop at the time to combat these problems.
There are some advantages that are mostly common sense, but bear a quick mention. Firstly, it’s hard to overestimate the benefit of personal relationships in online courses. Being a solo facilitator, you really get to know the students, and they you - this relationship helps hugely throughout. Secondly, language plays a big part in online teaching, particularly on technical subjects. I was able to adapt my language to students’ needs, and students became used to my style of writing. This would be more difficult with multiple teachers. Lastly, routines were very easy to establish. I have the same working hours most days, including breaks, and so can establish a ‘course checking’ routine quite easily. The students appreciated knowing approximately when they would receive answers each day, something which may be more unpredictable with varied facilitators.
Reasons to Work as a Team
I suspect the disadvantages to working alone will mostly be obvious, and revolve around scalability and redundancy.
It hasn’t happened often, but I have missed days due to illness - days on which there was no other option but to pause the course. There have also been days in which my responsiveness has dropped dramatically due to other commitments, such as events.
In terms of scale, I haven’t hit my limit in terms of student numbers yet, but such a limit certainly exists. A rule of thumb that I’ve developed is that 10 students take around 1 hour per day of facilitation. Therefore, a theoretical limit for a solo facilitator may be 70 or 80 students on a course. Most certainly, there will be economies of scale, but one person, on their own, will be unlikely to provide quality support for 200 students.
One less obvious disadvantage to solo facilitation is the lack of opportunity for critical feedback and double checking. On many occasions, over the years, I have had cause to change materials, or create additional resources, because of a particularly large number of questions around a particular topic. Interestingly, on the one course in which I was a joint facilitator, this was much less prevalent. Creating resources as a team, or at least proofing the materials of your fellow facilitators, leads to much more honed content, less complication and less student questions.
Suggestions For Multi-Facilitated Courses
Having stated the advantages, as I see them, to solo facilitation, I do realise that this is simply not practical in many contexts. Student numbers, working hours and various other reasons lead us to teach in teams, and not least for the ‘disadvantages’ that I list above.
I have also facilitated a number of online courses as part of a larger team in the past, most significantly on the Blended and Online Education masters course at Edinburgh Napier University. As a result of this ‘dual experience’ I would like to share some suggestions for teaching larger, multi-facilitated courses which may enable many of the ‘solo facilitation’ advantages
1. Treat a large course as a collection of smaller courses
This is not a new idea, but one which I still don’t see often. Create small groups within a large course, and give facilitators control over
those small groups. Keep conversations within and allow those relationships to develop, the language to establish and that routine to flow. This is a great way to overcome the ‘repeated effort’ problem discussed above, and dispensing with the need to read everything your fellow facilitators post. It also enables the advantage discussed around the lack of ability to hide within a course. Small groups and solo group leaders encourage full group participation.
Finally, this allows individual facilitators to develop that flexibility I discussed previously, perhaps changing tasks in small ways to suit the group.
A further possibility that this approach enables is that of experimentation. Try a different approach in each group, with that facilitator controlling their own variables. Compare the results through both analytics and survey. On a large course this could provide amazing amounts of data with very little extra effort.
2. Allow facilitators to lead particular units of the course
The main reason for this is to lend that facilitator more control over the delivery of that section, and allow for experiments and testing of new approaches. Giving one person control over the delivery of a small section has much less effect on the overall experience, so they can be free to be a little more radical than normal. They can also control the variables a little more closely by leading other facilitators in their approach. Other facilitators are more comfortable taking part in this approach, and more cooperative, with the knowledge that their turn for leading will come.
3. Establish a Routine
This is a simple one - act like a solo facilitator and create set times that someone, anyone is checking in and responding. With a larger team you have the advantage that this can be more often than a solo facilitator, say every 2 hours.
Concluding Thoughts
As is probably obvious by now, I’m a huge fan of teaching, experimenting and facilitating, both as a team and on my own. I do believe, however, that there are huge benefits to be had from
teaching small classes as a solo facilitator, many of which simple aren’t available to teams or larger courses.
I hope that the preceding materials effectively outline a new, innovative approach to doing so in the form of the ‘bite sized’ method, and highlight the advantages of carrying out this method in equally ‘bite sized’ classes, with you as the sole facilitator.
If circumstances require you to teach in larger groups, I do hope that the suggestions I propose above help to instil some of the power, the flexibility and the excitement of solo facilitating, and enable you to develop your own practice at a quicker pace.
In a world where MOOCs are encouraging bigger, bigger, bigger, I believe a lot more advantage can be found in shrinking, tailoring and segmentation, both for the facilitator and the learner.
References
Brennan, L. (2005). Integrating work-based learning into higher education – A guide to good practice. Bolton: University Vocational Awards Council.
Knowles, M. S. (2011). The adult learner: the definitive classic in adult education and human resource development (7th ed.). Amsterdam ; Boston: Elsevier.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge. Cambridge university press.
Nie, M., Armellini, A., Witthaus, G., & Barklamb, K. (2011). How do e‐ book readers enhance learning opportunities for distance work‐based learners? Research in Learning Technology, 19(1), 19–38. doi:10.1080/09687769.2010.548506
Open Facilitator Project
We are a team of open educators passionate about enhancing the learner and facilitator experience in open educational offers of different sizes, small, large or extra large. We feel that facilitator presence and engagement plays a key role in learning. If you have experience facilitating an open course and would like to share and/or reflect on this experience, please consider the following:
1. Contribute to the Open Facilitator Handbook We would like to create a dynamic handbook with the wider practitioners community that is envisaged to become a useful resource and guide for anybody embarking on open facilitation. Please click here to access the Open Facilitator Handbook and contribute. 2. Share your Open Facilitator Story Share your authentic open facilitation experience with the wider community. Each year stories will be made available as an annual Open Facilitator Stories collection, made available under a Creative Commons licence and become open data. Submitting your story means, that you are in agreement with this. To submit your story add it directly to the relevant section of the Open Facilitator Handbook or use the following form.
Thank you in advance for your collaboration and contribution. The Open Facilitator Project Team:
Centre for Excellence, Manchester Metropolitan University Carol Yeager, HE consultant Open Knowledge
You can also find us on Twitter using the hashtag #openfacilitator
- See more at: http://education.okfn.org/facilitator/#sthash.fED60h77.dpuf
Learning and Teaching in Action
Volume 11 Issue 1 2015
Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching Manchester Metropolitan University www.celt.mmu.ac.uk