Personal Blogs

Image source: Dynomapper

The following is my reflection on my contribution to the writing/setting of the context behind a team assignment as part of my master's in online and distance learning.  Our team's challenge (there are 7 teams) was to formulate an online response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We decided to focus on higher education institutions. In particular, to aid the ongoing widespread and partial transition to online teaching, and to support both educators and learners in this. For many who are unfamiliar with this mode of teaching /learning, the transition is a huge challenge, but solutions need to be found in order to secure their short term goals and long term survival. 

Of course, the development of our website is a very long term thing and the preliminaries are still ongoing. 

The site: Higher Education Open Education Resources, H817 COVID-19 RESPONSE TEAM 

My contribution to the context

I think my contribution was substantial.  I created the first draft of the aims, the context, the target audience.  Basically, the idea was the following:

• To  help educators and learners the world over to respond to the COVID-19 epidemic by aiding the transition to online teaching  by:

  • Creating an online repository for the sourcing of the open educational resources (OER) for independent learning of various subject areas. 

  • In addition to teaching/learning materials in a range of subject areas, we will place materials that support knowledge and understanding of open educational practices (OEP), its technology, tools, and open pedagogy in all its forms.

The context involved describing the pandemic but also the general need for universal education as articulated by bodies like the EU and UNESCO and how this was manifested in the growing interest in OER which gives access to wider audiences cheaper under open licenses.  I noted how COVID-19  had merely added to the momentum. I was one of the first to complete my personas, providing more concrete bases for our design. The context also involved distilling our conversation of the forces and concerns at work in student's lives in a definition of the website design challenge. I was responsible for drafting this definition of the design challenge that enabled us to correctly capture the essence of what the site needs to achieve and to focus on how.

My teammates
My teammates substantially added to and improved my initial draft by bringing more alive 'my concept' (of course repositories of this kind are not a new idea!) of a collaborative creator/user experience by expressing the interactive parts - the site would have a chatbot for queries, for example as well as other things I'd missed. I'd only mentioned that we should host the occasional webinar via the site and that it would contain instructional videos and podcasts we'd create. I was concerned about how much time the creators would have for these activities. 

Most challenging

The things I found most challenging were working to a deadline while working full time and applying for jobs.  Also, I learned more than anything about working with people - you have to be diplomatic and things seldom get off to a rip-roaring start when you don't know each other. I learned how to set up a website, which was important for me. Most important, perhaps, what huge incentive teamwork creates. Is it the competitive instinct? Is it the urge to please and help each other as well as learn together? A bit of everything really.