Personal Blogs

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 changes, students’ 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, 2020, Neelen, 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 team. The project explored the initial effects of COVID on team members’ personal and professional development needs as they worked remotely. It also looked at the features of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, cited 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 them. As 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 pedagogy. Available 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. 

Neelen, M. (2020) Email to Olivia Rowland, 20 December.