Supporting effective e-learning practitioner communities at Brookes and beyond

Richard Francis
Head of Media Workshop

In June 2005, a few days before my 49th birthday, I was surprised and delighted to learn that I had been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship. This prestigious award had, the previous year, been extended to include learning support staff and I had the good fortune to be put forward as the Brookes nominee in this category. Seven years after abandoning an 18-year teaching career to enter the new and still nebulous field of learning technology, I am heartened that the contribution of support staff to excellence in learning and teaching is being recognised in this way. The Fellowship takes effect from the start of this year (2006), with the release of a substantial three-year grant, affording me the opportunity to pursue professional goals that would otherwise be unattainable.

I support staff e-learning practitioners at Brookes, among whom we are fortunate to have colleagues of great skill and commitment. Our track record in e-learning innovation, research and support was recently acknowledged when Brookes was chosen by the HE Academy to take part, along with 11 other institutions, in the pilot phase of its e-learning benchmarking exercise for the UK HE sector. My project is to a large extent dedicated to facilitating the work of these colleagues and complements existing plans to further embed e-learning across the institution.

Ariadne’s thread

Although there is a lot of detail to sort out, the main goals of my project have not been difficult to decide, thanks to the culture of change management that is characteristic of e-learning at Brookes, namely one of cross-hierarchical collaboration. Where decisions are collaboratively taken, experiences resulting from their implementation are more likely to be shared and changes in practice to become embedded. Like Ariadne’s thread, the theme of collaboration runs through the work of our practitioner communities, such as course development teams, learning technologists and staff developers. As a central coordinator of e-learning support, I want to reinforce the threads linking the main communities of staff e-learning practitioners within the University (and potentially beyond) by facilitating the growth of user-centric online networks for collaboration, knowledge and information management and the sharing of good practice. For tensile strength, the software architecture will have to be scalable and component-based for flexibility of functionality and offer support for open standards.

Representing and transforming knowledge

The enhancement of learning and teaching through the application of learning technologies is a multi-disciplinary team endeavour. Among those helping in the design of effective e-learning experiences for Brookes students are groups such as the Media Workshop, OCSLD, the Learning Technologists Forum, the Centre for e-Learning (C4eL) and the e-Learning Forum. The groups serve to pool expertise and good practice from various domains and play a key part in the representation and transformation of knowledge within the University. Furthermore, having multiple professional identities, the groups’ members are able to cross organisational and disciplinary boundaries and thereby to assist the flow of information and brokerage of collaborative working practices between communities. Members may find themselves moving from the core of one community to the periphery of another: a Media Workshop learning technologist, for example, is central to the community known as the Learning Technologists Forum but a (legitimate) guest at an academic course development team meeting. For boundary crossing to be effective, knowledge that normally remains tacit within a community must be made explicit and shared. In the process it may be scrutinised and transformed.

Borrowing from the concept of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), we can see that members of intersecting communities are catalysts for collaboration and brokers of expertise. Learning technologists, for example, routinely mine community memory to match requests for help with specific e-learning techniques with appropriate sources of expertise. The result is a collaborative learning process that Lave and Wenger (ibid) describe as “generative social practice”. Where learning technology is concerned, we have probably all been faced with the need to learn how to use a new piece of software and either not wanting to read the manual or not getting the necessary information from it. Orr (1990), described how IBM photocopier repair engineers bypass ‘the manual’ by exchanging war stories, through which sometimes tacit knowledge is exchanged and advanced. This is certainly an apt description of the process of troubleshooting WebCT in Learning Technologist Forum meetings!

By definition, communities that are concerned with innovation through use of information and communication technology are bound to produce varied and ever-changing representations of knowledge: online papers and responses (eg the Journal of Interactive Media in Education), case studies and discussion (eg the Brookes Here and Now conference), editable resources (such as Media Workshop and OCSLD workshops and training guides), interactive toolkits and checklists (eg GoLive checklist for online courses), database activities (eg the Open Exemplar database).

“New information and communication technologies make it possible to develop and use representations in new ways, which blur the distinction between representations as finished artefacts, and representing as a collaborative activity [my emphasis]. Active representations (such as above) can support a process of peer supported experimentation within the context of online communities of practice.”

Sharpe, Beetham & Ravenscroft (2004)

Reasons for change

The collaborative activity of representing is transformative and has helped to reshape the way many Brookes courses are designed and experienced. Currently however, aside from face-to-face meetings, the primary channels of communication among our e-learning communities are the web and email. Media Workshop, for example, maintains its own and the Centre for eLearning’s websites. However, communication through static web pages creates numerous issues, including gatekeeping, legitimacy, ownership, currency, resourcing, peer participation, and experimentation. Also, the transformative potential of active research outputs is not fully exploited by the current formats of our learning and teaching publications. Online collaborative technologies could be harnessed to foster tighter integration of research and practitioner communities.

There are strategic drivers for change in this area. Our e-learning strategy for 2005-8 calls for “a suite of reusable online resources to support e-learning developers…” (Deliverable 1.4 Portfolio 1: embedding e-learning into curriculum design and development) and for standards-conformant repositories for learning objects and research outputs (Deliverable 3.1 Portfolio 3: Improving and expanding e-learning environments). Elsewhere we talk of the need to develop, enable and value our e-learning practitioners (Deliverable 2.1 Portfolio 2).

When I’m 52

Here to end with is a selection of imagined but credible scenarios for how user-centric online networks for collaboration, knowledge and information management and the sharing of good practice might be used in practice at Brookes and beyond.

By the time I’m 52, I want for my colleagues and for myself an online space where I can move from one online community to another; where communities are dynamic and I can easily set up spaces tailored to their needs. Perhaps I need to put out a draft funding bid for online consultation on our intranet, or convene and track a cross-disciplinary project team with deadlines and deliverables; perhaps the whole team will contribute to the project report and I will need version control to manage the editing process; and we’ll need to publish regular web updates for our sponsors. Rather than periodically being compiled into static html pages, user issues with the VLE will be submitted and discussed directly on our FAQ page. I’d like to aggregate my colleagues’ blog entries into a report on that conference we attended last week. I’m going to gather feedback from a planned series of seminars and if the demand is there, consolidate participants into an ongoing interest group. I need to create a wiki-style good practice guide with colleagues in learner support. I’m coordinating a regional symposium with a widely distributed team of organisers and international guests. I’ll need online registration, self-publication of abstracts, presentation files, pre- and post-event discussion boards…

Suddenly three years seems like a very short time.

References

Lave, J and Wenger, E (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,.
Orr, J (1990). “Sharing knowledge, celebrating identity: war stories and community memory in a service culture,” in Middleton, DS and Edwards, D (eds) Collective Remembering: Memory in Society. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Sharpe, R, Beetham, H and Ravenscroft, A (2004). “Active artefacts: representing our knowledge of learning and teaching”. Article based on a workshop given at the 8th Annual SEDA Conference. Birmingham, November 2003.
Star, S L (1989). “The structure of ill-structured solutions: boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving,” Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2, pp37-54.