Category: Conference Presentation

#ALTC 2017 presentation1: An Agile and Scalable Professional Development Strategy: The CMALT cMOOC Project [1618]

An Agile and Scalable Professional Development Strategy: The CMALT cMOOC Project [1618]

https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2017/sessions/an-agile-and-scalable-professional-development-strategy-the-cmalt-cmooc-project-1618/

Introduction

Globally there is a shortage of higher education practitioners and researchers evidencing a critical engagement with the intersection between teaching, learning, and technology. We believe an open and agile approach to professional development (PD) will allow higher education practitioners and researchers to embrace the rapidly changing and complex environment of technology and affordances to explore their impact on teaching and learning. Educators need to critically theorise the intersection between learning theory, technology and frameworks leading to new pedagogical practices and understanding of technology enhanced learning. This is epitomised in the adoption of the scholarship of technology enhanced learning or SOTEL (Haynes, 2016), that brings Boyer’s (1990) concept of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) into the twenty-first century.

Session Outline

Traditional PD strategies revolve around either the provision of a series of workshops or completion of a post-graduate qualification in learning and teaching. In contrast to these traditional PD approaches, we have leveraged a connectivist MOOC strategy to support a global network of PD Communities of practice (COP). In this session we will outline the model we have used to develop and implement a prototype PD cMOOC: http://mosomelt.wordpress.com/about/ (Cochrane and Narayan, 2016, Cochrane et al., 2015). Peer participation and sharing of praxis are triggered through the cMOOC that aims to scaffold participants to generate critical reflective practice evidence for CMALT portfolio accreditation, outlined at http://tinyurl.com/CMALTcMOOC. Interactive participant feedback techniques will include a Twitter back channel and an online participant survey. Participants will be invited to join us in the development of our first iteration of the CMALT cMOOC project.

Project Updates at:

References

Boyer, E. 1990. Scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate, Princeton, NJ, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Cochrane, T. & Narayan, V. 2016. Evaluating a Professional Development cMOOC: MOSOMELT. In: Barker, S., Dawson, S., Pardo, A. & Colvin, C. (eds.) Show Me The Learning. Proceedings ASCILITE 2016 Adelaide. University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia: Ascilite.

Cochrane, T., Narayan, V. & Burcio-Martin, V. 2015. Designing a cMOOC for Lecturer Professional Development in the 21st Century. In: Keengwe, J. & Onchwari, G. (eds.) Handbook of Research on Active Learning and the Flipped Classroom Model in the Digital Age. Hershey, PA, USA: IGI Global.

Haynes, D. 2016. Introducing SOTEL. International Journal for the Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning, 1, 1-2.

The tack, skål, IKEA challenge @larsnorqvist @isaja @andreasolsson7 @atz119

TackSkalIKEA
Based upon our experiences and subsequent brainstorming conversations at the ECTEL2013 Conference where @ATZ119 (Laurent Antonczak) and I (@thomcochrane) participated in the Mobile Learning Creativity Workshop and presented a paper was born the Tack, skål, IKEA challenge. We were challenged by the Swedish delegation (@larsnorqvist, @Isaja, @AndreasOlsson7) to share a non-PowerPoint presentation that illustrated our approach to using communities of practice and social media for lecturer professional development – getting lecturers to “think differently” about teaching and learning. Basically we give lecturers an experience of being a learner themselves within an authentic context where we model the educational use of mobile social media – hoping that they will then use this practice with their own students. One of the keys is rethinking assessment strategies and integrating the use of mobile social media in their courses.

Lars Norqvist (@larsnorqvist) sent us the challenge to participate virtually in the “Learning in Focus” Conference in Umea, Sweden, 12-13 November 2013: “I write to you because of the brilliant idea of a tack,skål, IKEA-session. The session has somewhat developed an idea here at a conference in Northern part of Sweden. Below you can see two videos. One presents the general idea about our research and one presents a challenge to you for the conference.

I would be really glad if you can present your work about teaching, learning, recognition of students learning as a kind of modelling technology – if possible.”

Here are links to Lars’ video intro and challenge:

And here is our attempt at creating a mobile social media video playlist in response:

The final contribution to the “Learning in Focus” Conference can be found at http://larandeifokus.se/modelling-technology/

Hopefully the first of many collaborations with the Swedes and the Kiwis 🙂