For two days last week, the e-Learning team at the University of Bath, along with some colleagues in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, participated in the Cheetah project. The aim of Cheetah is to promoting change to practice through embedding e-Learning in learning and teaching across Higher Education Institutes (HEIs).
The process involved bringing together a variety of Directors’ of Studies, Graduate Teaching Assistants, Learning Technologists and a Librarian, with the intention to being to re-design a particular undergraduate unit. A couple of colleagues have already written summary reports which might be of interest, and which give an overview of the two days; links are as follows: post 1, post 2.
Given the nature of the two days, I was invited to attend the second day with the intention of lending my help and expertise during the time when colleagues would be (re-)designing their Moodle course, and potentially using some other e-Learning tools too. Unfortunately, this day also clashed with a presentation that I was due to give at lunchtime, so my involvement was a little fragmented. Therefore in the six stages of the Cheetah, I was only really directly involved in one: Building a prototype online.
I would, however, like to sum up my reflective observations from my involvement into three points:
- Taking on board my experience from my involvement in the National Student Learning Programme, I would have expected the walls of the room to be covered in the flipchart slides from the previous’ days’ activities. I felt that this was a missed opportunity as this could have set the scene for day two. For someone who was coming in half-way through this intervention, I felt that this could have helped me get up to speed much quicker as to some of the outputs from day one’s activities. I have similar feelings about the “post-it note” approach that we taken to the course redesign. This was a great idea though I would have used a projector to get a large image so that everyone in the room knew the layout of the course. This might have avoided crowding around a table. Even with the projector, “post-it’s” could have been moved around easily.
- I appreciated that the job of the facilitator could be difficult at times, and he did well to bring the group together when conversation was becoming unfocused. We talked in the e-Learning team about how the Cheetah model (facilitated by an external) might be transferred to something run in-house. Two things to mention here: [1] the role of the facilitator and the Learning Technologist (or similar) should be kept separate if at all possible, and the roles defined at the outset. Both roles in this particular intervention were “full time”, so to speak. [2] perhaps it might be advisable to have sessions such as this always facilitated by a person external to the University, who isn’t aware of working relationships between colleagues, teams and departments? This approach clearly has its pros and cons.
- I was slightly apprehensive coming into an intervention on the second day, having missed the conversations which took place on the first. Whilst I appreciated that the Learning Technologist(s) would have limited input on day one, being in the room might have given me more of a background to the unit (vision, learning outcomes, dependencies, exit points) from which I could have given advice and lent a helping hand. Given that I was also called away during the Reality checking part of intervention, I found it difficult to feel that I had really understood what it was that the participants were trying to achieve.
This is a useful exercise to undertake, and I would be interested to speak to colleagues at the other Cheetah partner institutions who have gone through the process themselves. The next steps (within a given timescale) from this process, would be:
- Evaluate, with participants, the effectiveness of the process. Was it two days well spent? Were the format and approach appropriate for the participants?
- Support the course team with their own “next steps”. Inevitably some work still remains to get this re-designed unit ready for next semester.
- Consider how this intervention might be disseminated through the University of Bath. Is this approach transferable to other units, or might the process have to be tweaked for different departments?
