Steering Group Meeting - On and Offline

On Monday we had our Steering Group meeting and with lots of snow still on the ground we went with a mixture of plan A and B. Those of us that were local and able to get to college easily met in the small meeting room at Abingdon and Witney College and those that weren't able to travel joined us online via Blackboard Collaborate.

Those that made it to the meeting in person got to enjoy a lovely selection of cakes made by Ellen Lessner (Project Leader) - they were delicious! 

The meeting room was set up with a computer, conference speaker phone, webcam, projector and an iPad plus a couple of phones just in case. You can never have too much technology available!

With the webcam set up Artie, Eddie and Nigel were able to see everyone in the meeting including three students from the core group who attended the first half of the meeting.

We made use of some of the features of Blackboard Collaborate including using it to show the project website and blog and used the tick feature to confirm that everyone could see it.


Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

Advanced webinar training

During the last two weeks of term, we ran two sessions on advanced training on Webinars for the core students involved in the Students4webES project. The first session was run live with the presenter, Owen Hanmer from the JISC RSC SE in Kent, presenting to the group using Blackboard Collaborate. The session covered how to run a webinar via Collaborate including moderator settings and the chance for students to moderate a practice webinar. The whole session was recorded and used during the second session to train the other half of the core group. 

Students participating in the advanced webinar training session

All the students who attended the three hour training session received a certificate of participation. We are now ready to put our new knowledge into action and get started with our first webinar with an employer.... watch this space!

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager

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

Just getting started...

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Having started our project just over a month ago, on the 15^th October, we have recently recruited a volunteer group of students to work with us on our JISC Advance project – Students4WebES – here at Abingdon & Witney College. Our project is about Webinars and Employability skills and involves Level 3 students.

Our first session with the volunteer students and staff involved in the project, luckily coincided with the JISC online conference – Innovating e-Learning 2012: Shaping the future - which was so helpful when trying to explain what a webinar is and why they are becoming so popular.

We logged into a live session at the conference and briefly discussed what was happening and watched for a short period of time.  This made it so easy for the staff and students to gain a very quick overview of a webinar before attending one of the 3 introductory sessions being run on webinars for all the 2^nd year Level 3 students on our Professional Futures Programme. 

Post by Emma Procter-Legg
Students4WebES Project Manager