Support, collaboration and discussion in the Post-16 community

A large part of the current project is putting together a blended learning course on Moodle which will provide post-16 institutions in the UK with a means to deliver an' Introduction to Webinar Skills'.  Building a course which can be delivered by unknown people in different institutions is a challenge.  Are we being overly ambitious? 

However, as the course is nearly complete, we knew that we needed some help from potential users to make it as 'usable' as possible within the time and financial constraints of this small project so we asked for reviewers from the post-16 community via e-mail lists; ILT Champions and the Association of Learning Technologists.  We were overwhelmed by offers from both groups and so grateful that people were willing to freely give their time to review our course and offer us helpful feedback.

This is a public thank you to those who replied and given us the opportunity to make the course as good as it can be.  We are realistic and of course, anyone downloading the course (eventually) can customise it to suit their institution and group.  The lesson for us is that the community of interested practitioners is a strong one and supportive with it.   The reviewers, and the participants at the ALT-C 2014 conference mentioned in a previous post,who have discussed the options and issues with us on course design and content have been very valuable.

Thank you.

Post by: Ellen Lessner, Project Lead

ALTC 2014 Learning to Ride: Putting the pieces together

Below is the Prezi from our session earlier today. Thank you so much for all the feedback and helpful comments on our Moodle course.

Abstract accepted for the 2014 ALT Conference

Back in March, we submitted an abstract to present at this year's ALT Conference. We are really pleased to say that our abstract has been accepted and we will be presenting at this year's conference.

The 21st annual conference held by ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) will run from Monday 1st to Wednesday 3rd September 2014 in Warwick. The conference theme is "Riding Giants: How to innovate and educate ahead of the wave".

Cakes from last year's 20th ALT Conference

Below is a brief overview of our proposed session:

As we ride through (another) period of educational change, participants will have an opportunity to discuss and reflect on individual, sector and institutional positions of useful employment skills delivered within an educational setting.

Activities:

• Introduction to the project ('Students for Webinar Employability Skills: Students4Webes) background

• Demonstration of our pilot Moodle course 'Webinar skills for the 21st Century

• Key lessons learned about designing a blended course as an OER and supporting the staff who deliver it

• Discussion: How do we support staff who deliver a blended course they haven't designed? How to best assess a blended Level 3 course?

• Conclusion with Q and A

We are looking forward to presenting and hope to see you there!

The early bird conference rate is available until the 14th July, click here to find out more.

Help wanted! Webinar Skills Course Design Consultation

Last week, we attended the Jisc Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group meeting in Bristol.

Ellen Lessner and I were invited to present as part of a session on projects from the Jisc FE and Skills Development and Resources Programme - Embedding Benefits strand. We used the opportunity to present our draft Webinar Skills Course and to gather feedback about the design and usability of it.

Draft Webinar Skills Course

We ran our session: 'Help wanted!  Webinar Skills Course Design Consultation' twice and received some really helpful and insightful feedback from the participants. Below are a number of initial changes we are planning on implementing in response to the feedback:

1. Produce a screencast showing how to navigate the course.
2. Merge the 'Resource' section into the other sections.
3. Highlight the importance of group work.
4. Include screenshots showing the 'tutor view' of each section and the 'student view' (the course is built in Moodle with some resources and sections hidden from student view).
5. Display brief instructions on how each resource/activity can be used.

We would like to thank all the participants who attended our session. We greatly appreciate all the help and feedback you have given us.

Emma Procter-Legg

Project Manager

Designing a webinar course

We recently had our second course planning meeting with Owen Hanmer from Jisc. We met online via BlackBoard Collaborate, which was an ideal opportunity to review the functions and features available within the software.

Our aim is to create a Moodle course that contains all the resources, activities and assessment required to run the webinar course, as well as resources to support staff delivering it. By creating the course in Moodle it will enable a proportion of it to be delivered and assessed online. This aspect of the course design fits in with one of the recommendations from the recent FELTAG report (the Further Education Learning Technology Action Group). FELTAG recommends that courses include 'a 10% wholly-online component' (pg. 23), it goes onto recommend an increase in e-assessment and the use of 'open badges' to accredit digital skills.

We are currently reviewing the options for incorporating open badges into our course design as well as a certificate of completion. We will be posting further updates on our course development very soon, so watch this space!

Let the planning begin!

Earlier this week we were in London for a meeting with Owen Hanmer, from Jisc.  The purpose of the meeting was to start planning our course on learning to set up and run a webinar. Owen ran a number of training sessions on webinar skills during the original Students4webES project and was an obvious choice to help us in the planning of this course.

We arrived in London for our meeting and the first thing that struck me about the meeting room  was that it was all set up perfectly for webinars and teleconferencing.

In the middle of the room, suspended above the table was a microphone, perfectly placed for capturing everything being discussed and on one wall a set of screens and a video camera again perfectly arranged to capture the meeting and fully support 'virtual participation'.

Fuelled by a number of cups of coffee we managed to put together a draft outline of the course. It is clear that it will continue to evolve over the coming weeks, but it is great to have a first draft down on paper (well actually on a shared Google Doc)!

The course will be built as a downloadable Moodle course with resources and activities for a blended learning delivery. We estimate the course will be about 20 hours of learning, but this could well change once we start to investigate getting the course accredited for funding.

Next stop: another meeting, this time with a video editor to look at improving the webinar recordings and to produce a more polished version of the top tips student produced video.

Reflection in Action

Often during the course of a project, many issues can arise which require ‘thinking on your feet’ or to give it its proper name  ‘reflection in action’ (Schon, 1983). This project is no different, we have had to consider the situation and then make a decision based on what feels right at the time. Even if we have had a couple of days to think about the issue and decide on the best way forward, it is still decision making ‘in action’; there is no going back and starting again!

As we rapidly head towards the mid point of the project we have already made a number of these types of decisions – the best way to communicate, which software to use, how to form a ‘performing team’ from two groups of students…

An example of a decision that we have made during the project that might have been different with the benefit of hindsight, was the cohort of students the core group is made up from. The initial plan was to look for a group of 25 volunteer students from the second year level 3 students on the Futures Programme, run the initial training with the whole cohort and the advanced training with a volunteer core group. However this didn’t go according to plan. Having delivered a 15 minute session about the project to the initial cohort and asked for volunteers, we only received a handful of responses. We decided to open the project up to the first year students on the Futures Programme and the A level students too, to help us reach our 25 student target.

This decision did help us to recruit further students, some of whom are highly motivated, but  it also created a whole extra level of complexity to the project.

From this, timetabling constraints developed as the first years and second years have different days off college; one being a study day and the other a work day. The A level students have totally different timetables so it hasn’t been possible to have all the students meet face to face on the same day.

We now have two groups; one that meets on a Monday and the other on a Tuesday. So the question arises,  “How do you get the two groups to perform as a team when they don’t meet face to face?”  We are working on this at the moment, and using a Moodle course that they can use to contact each other and see what work has been completed. We have tried to facilitate virtual meetings, testing out different potential webinar platforms but this has been difficult to arrange and achieve due to the differing deadlines on each of the courses that the students are on. We will continue to try and pre-empt potential issues but I am sure there will be more ‘thinking on our feet’ to come before the end of this project!

References:

SCHÖN D A (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action London: Temple Smith

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Introduction to Webinar sessions

There are many challenges to running a JISC project in a FE college. For one thing, it's difficult to find a common time for people to meet. Unlike a university, where many/most students can get transport back to their halls or flats fairly easily, our students are dependent on parents, friends, buses to get home and often work as well as study.

We are using Moodle, SMS and email to communicate and we have weekly meetings during a 45 minute lunch break.

The good news is that we have had 3 weeks of an Introduction to Webinars for L3 students in the second year of the Professional Futures programme. The presenter, Owen Hanmer from the JISC RSC SE, along with an 'employer', Phil Robinson, also from the RSC, were in Kent, presenting to 3 groups in 3 different rooms while I did the introduction and summary in a 4th room, using Blackboard Collaborate. This gave the students a demonstration of a webinar platform, its use as a skill that might increase employability and useful information on what an employer looks for when hiring new staff. That reduces the number of students who didn't know what a webinar was!

Post by Ellen Lessner
Students4WebES Project Lead