For the past 2 days we have been running a Cheetah workshop at the University of Bath. Cheetah, a Pathfinder project funded by the HEA, stands for Change by embedding e-learning in teaching across HEIs.
The process has involved identifying a teaching unit and working with lecturers, librarians and e-learning colleagues to re-design it in a student-centred blended format incorporating effective and appropriate e-tivities. The course chosen at Bath was a first year undergraduate unit in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences.
The workshop process has 6 stages:
1. Writing a course blueprint
2. Making a storyboard
3. Building a prototype online
4. Reality checking
5. Review and adjustment
6. Planning next steps
9 colleagues participated in the workshop, which was supported by an external facilitator.
My participation was on 2 levels:
- As a learning technologist helping in the re-design of the course.
- As an observer considering whether the process could be replicated across the institution as a potential change model.
The workshops were lively and participants engaged with the process. The learning technologists had less imput on the first day which mostly involved the course team reflecting on the current form of the unit, revisiting learning outcomes and planning their new blueprint. On the second day we set about building the prototype together, creating a course structure and some e-tivities in the VLE (Moodle). By the end of the second day the general feeling was that a great deal had been achieved and participants had a clear idea of the next steps which were necessary to finish the re-design.
My initial reflections on the process were:
1. The 2-day workshop format worked well, and has the potential to be cascaded at Bath. Bringing a range of colleagues together produced a powerful working group and useful outcomes.
2. The facilitator role is key. This would need to be carefully considered. We had thought that this role could potentially be performed by one of the Learning Technologists, but following the experience of this workshop I believe that this would be inadvisable. The facilitator needs to be able to stand back and maintain an overview whereas the Learning Technologists get heavily involved in the design process, especially on the second day.
3. Having student feedback (from the reality checkers) early on in the design stage was extremely useful. This not only helped in the design of this course but also provided the e-learning team with ideas about other potential developments, for example creation of Moodle course and e-tivity templates, and the need for additional supporting resources on course design.
4. The e-moderator role wasn’t discussed in any depth during the workshop, but we would need to consider the relationship between the Cheetah process and staff development in the area of e-moderation.
Our next steps will be to:
- continue to work with the course team on completing the re-worked unit and evaluating its effectiveness when it is run next semester.
- feed back to and share experiences with the Cheetah project team and partner institutions.
- consider whether and how the process might be rolled out more widely at Bath.
Filed under: e-learning design | Tagged: Cheetah project, e-learning design
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