How do we develop part-time distance teaching staff in best practice for using Blackboard Collaborate with student groups?

Anne Campbell, Graham StoreyThe UK Open University1

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Educational setting

• The Open University is the biggest university in the UK, and a world leader in flexible distance learning

• Around 200,000 part-time students based all over UK and global – urban, rural, remote, small towns

• Student ages from school-leavers to retired with busy & active lives (median age of new undergraduates is 29)

• Personal tutor (Associate Lecturer or AL) as part of a small group

• Distance learning & distance teaching: large highly distributed workforce who rarely have the chance to meet face to face

• Long history of synchronous online tuition: Lyceum, Elluminate, now BB Collaborate – being rolled out across all teaching

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Effective staff development…

Learning in the workplace often is:

• Informal: ‘unintentional and results from interaction with co-workers’

• Situated: ‘involves making sense of the daily learning that occurs in organisations and involves examining embedded knowledge and encouraging learners to be self-directed and reflect on their learning experiences’

• Social and community building: ‘represented by a range of strategies including conversation, social interaction, teamwork and mentoring’

(Clus, 2011)

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Challenges for distance developers

How do we…

• …create opportunities for development which distributed distance staff want to and are able to attend?

• …design development which incorporate some of the features of informal, situated & social learning situations? (Knight et al, 2006; Clus, 2011)

• …include opportunities to learn experientially? (Campbell & Macdonald, 2011)

• …create a sense of presence and community? (Kear, 2011)

• …make development relevant to staff ’s own working practices? (Ottenbreich-Leftwich, 2010)

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Challenges for OU developers

• Large (~5,500) diverse body of distance Associate Lecturer staff with differing constraints on their time

• Wide spectrum of general online technical ability– From apprehensive staff: reluctance to change from familiar methods of

teaching, inability to understand simple computing tasks– To early adopters: need for advanced development both pedagogically and

technically, expert in general computing

• Regional, faculty and module system within the OU

• Gauging demand – sometimes can have huge bottlenecks

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• Large groups of staff still need introductory training in the features and tools

• After basic training many are stuck on replicating face to face tutorials instead of thinking about how to use the new environment imaginatively

• Can often end up with one pedagogical style – lecture with element of questioning, and student questions at the end

Challenges for OU Collaborate developers

• There can be distrust of teaching ideas outside own discipline

• Need for pedagogical development, running in tandem with development on features

• Also need occasional development of practice outside formal staff development

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Usage stats

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Rooms Started Total Attendees

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Desktop Total Mobile Total

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Meeting the challenge:OU Live Pathways– a choice of core routes

Identify development need based on experience

Beginner or needing basics refresher

1-week moderated

cohort route

Supported, open-ended

self-study route

Already experienced, want to learn more

2-week moderated

cohort route

Supported, open-ended

self-study route

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Cohort routes – ‘Tutor Moderators’

Practice

Reflection with peers

Module

activity

• 1-week online ‘Introduction’ to OU Live, part of a 3-week ‘Introduction to Online tutoring’. Can be taken as standalone week. Takes ~5 hours

• New 2-week online ‘Advanced’ module. Takes ~ 14 hours

• Experiential learning: online activities

• Synchronous and near-synchronous activities

• Experience of being a student online

• Pastoral support by moderator (the identifiable individual)

(Campbell & Macdonald, 2011)

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Completion rates on cohort routes

• Up to 25 participants per presentation in each module. Often run with 18 or 20.

• Introductory route: ~2800 participants since Feb 2010 with a 72% completion rate

• Advanced route: just started – 3 presentations so far. 60 participants with 73% completion rate

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Exit evaluation data on introductory cohort module

• Increase in overall confidence and competence

Terrified Anxious Moderately confident

Confident Very con-fident

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

16%

52%

26%

6%0%1%

10%

45%39%

5%

How confident are you as a moderator?

Start of moduleEnd of module

(Mar 2012 to April 2015, n = 383, 45% response)

Complete Novice

Generally un-familiar

Moderately competent

Competent Very compe-tent

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

36% 38%

20%

4%1%2%

5%

51%

38%

5%

How competent are you as a mod-erator?

Start of moduleEnd of module

(Mar 2012 to April 2015, n = 383, 45% response)

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– I am looking forward to having a go. Before this module I was dreading it!

– The demo was the most useful part of the course. Being a student in itself was very valuable.

– The use of breakout rooms was previously a mystery to me but now I will be using them!

– The course gave space and time to practice working with OU Live, as well as demonstration, explanation and support which I found very useful.

– …there is so much to OU Live that it is almost the case that the more you know, the less you know…

– …it was good to know that competence with basic OU Live tools would enable one to produce an effective tutorial and the more complex elements could be introduced later when confidence and competence have grown.

Participant perceptions (Introductory module)

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Participant perceptions (Advanced module)

– (The module)… is so well designed, with all parts interconnecting with each other ie teaching, practice, reflection (personal and collaborative).

– I was quite surprised by the variety of uses of the whiteboard in OU Live in producing interactive sessions for students.

– fostering a community of learning using OU Live sessions... is one of the learning points I intend to use…

– The OU Live sessions… offered a valuable opportunity for taking a student’s perspective on the use of OU Live .

– I got an awful lot from the final activity in which we presented our ideas: this sharing of our practices and ideas was extremely useful.

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Non-cohort routes – ‘Independent’

• Aimed at tutors who prefer self paced, self-study to group work

• Provide an overflow when cohort reaches capacity

• Moodle VLE delivery, similar to cohort route

• Activities designed for self study BUT

• Introductory route offers early opportunities to join a Live! session. Can’t collaborate alone.

• Collaborative production by team of PALS

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Practice roomsprominent

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Communities of practice

• ‘Helping hand’ forum

• Online rooms forum

• OU Live wiki

• Shares good practice

• Open to all staff

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Other development initiatives for OU Live

• ‘PALS’ – Peer Associate Lecturer Support group

• Exemplar tutorials in different disciplines (Macdonald and Campbell, 2011)

• Face to face development sessions – eg scenarios, sharing practice

• One-off online ‘Talking point’ events (Campbell & Jones, 2014)

• Series of ‘transition’ events

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Overall principles

Relevant and timely to own working practices

Scaffold - start simple, build up from the basics

Practice alone or with peers

Experiential online activities – learn as you do

Grounded in pedagogy

Informal social learning – learn as you discuss and share ideas

Offer choice – time-limited cohort or own-pace self-study

Supported learning with peer moderators

Reflect on own and others’ actions

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Contact details…

Dr Anne CampbellOnline Educational Developeranne.campbell@open.ac.uk

Graham StoreyProject Managergraham.storey@open.ac.uk

Associate Lecturer Support and Professional Development teamThe UK Open University