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Olivia Rowland

Responses to conference questions

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Edited by Olivia Rowland, Sunday, 21 Feb 2021, 20:40

Thank you to everyone who posted questions. Here are my responses:

Is it all you doing this? What roles and tasks do other team members take on?

Yes, it is all me doing the admin and organisation, although colleagues take on the roles as facilitators and speakers. I asked a few colleagues if they could help with the organisation and they all said they didn't have time, which was disappointing.

My next plan is to ask the most recent new starter if he can help out, with the reasoning that it'll be a good way to help him get to know people and understand his role better.

How transferable do you think this model is to other teams? I mean, does this work because it’s a learning tech team?

I think it would be very transferable. There's nothing particularly different about it given its use in a learning design team - although it's possible that in other teams, people's roles are more clearly defined, they're not rushed off their feet and might engage more. Some teams might struggle with the technology (we use MS Teams, which seems to be being constantly updated) but I think everyone's struggling with it slightly at the moment.

what reaction have you had from your colleagues?

Initially people thought it was a great idea and were enthusiastic, but as time has gone on, excitement has waned. The last meeting was not good because hardly anyone turned up, so I expect to see continued mixed responses depending on how busy people are.

I plan to speak to the team manager fairly soon to get his reaction to the group. I rather feel that I shouldn't have had to organise a community of practice - it's a manager's job to make sure staff know how to do their jobs and have the resources to do so, not an employee's - and ideally I'd like to hand some of this over to someone more senior.

how do you find sharepoint as a hosting platfrom?

I prefer Sharepoint to Teams - at least you can organise things in it - but there are baffling gaps in its functionality that frustrate me. However, I'm grateful every day that I don't have to use Teams for hosting content as I find that almost impossible to use.

Has your team gained any new members of staff since the pandemic started and if so have they found this community of practice helpful as they become familiar with working in the team.

Yes, we've had one. He has found it helpful and, as noted above, I'm hoping to rope him into helping me with it. Our job isn't very clearly defined and it's quite easy to find yourself doing things that we aren't meant to be doing, and one of the benefits of the community is that it's helped me identify some of the boundaries of the role. 

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Olivia Rowland

Poster and abstract for H818 conference, 'The networked practitioner'

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Edited by Olivia Rowland, Wednesday, 3 Feb 2021, 19:49


Abstract for presentation at the H818 conference 2021

Universities worldwide had to ‘pivot’ face-to-face teaching to online and hybrid methods during the COVID19 pandemic. Researchers are already exploring the impacts of these changesstudents’ responses to them and what can be learnt from these. However, there has been little research on the impact of COVID on workplace learning (Gubbins, 2020Neelen, 2020) despite its importance for many more people 

This situation informed the rationale of this project, which explored the impact of COVID-related lockdown on the learning needs of members of the Open University’s learning design teamThe project explored the initial effects of COVID on team members’ personal and professional development needs as they worked remotelyIt also looked at the features of a community of practice (Lave and Wengercited in Li et al., 2009) and their suitability in addressing the identified needs, and explored how such a solution could be implemented. It then focused on practical aspects of harnessing the experience and talents of community members to ensure that tacit knowledge could be shared and explored. 

A range of needs were identified by team members during the initial phases of the project. These included a need to share practice to ensure that they could provide up-to-date advice to course teams they supported. New starters also struggled to understand their roles, having lost the ability to observe others easily and ask questions in the moment. In addition, a significant issue identified was the loss of informal learning opportunities. When the team worked on site, the office kitchen was often used for informal chats, uncovering of tacit knowledge and peer support. The loss of this location and the associated learning opportunities was felt keenly by team members, especially as online collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams failed to provide similar levels of emotional support and practical guidance. A community of practice was a way to address these needs, with the overarching need for a space for informal discussion and peer support forming the basis for both the project’s title and development. 

The project was designed with openness in mind. Team members were consulted on plans for community meetings with the aim of enabling them to become 'creators of information’ (Bates, 2019). Guidance was also sought from managers and higher education practitioners via social media and direct communication. Developments made a result of this feedback will be shared openly via blog posts.  

This presentation will explore the team’s challenges in more detail and outline how the community of practice addressed themAs noted, one of the key outputs from the project will be a series of blog posts outlining how feedback informed the development of the community and how this feedback was captured, implemented and communicated. The presentation will introduce these posts and summarise their content. It is hoped that this and the project itself will support managers and others responsible for workplace learning to establish their own communities of practice.  

References 

Bates, T. (2019) Open pedagogyAvailable at: https://www.tonybates.ca/2019/09/26/chapter-11-4-open-pedagogy/ (Accessed: 31 December 2020). 

Gubbins, C. (2020) Email to Olivia Rowland, 21 December. 

Li, L.C. et al. (2009) ‘Evolution of Wenger’s concept of community of practice’, Implementation Science, 4(1), pp. 11–11. doi: 10.1186/1748-5908-4-11. 

NeelenM. (2020) Email to Olivia Rowland, 20 December. 


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