First full learning design workshop done and dusted

Last week we offered our first full learning design workshop to staff members across all Faculties. We had 20 participants - way more than we expected for 2,5 days at our beautiful campus in Granger Bay. The workshop was a result of work we have been doing in collaboration between the Centre for Innovative Educational Technology and the Fundani Curriculum Development Unit. We have been drawing from our experiences of our blended learning design short course, in which we tried to promote a Design Thinking mindset. We characterise a design thinking mindset as a mindset that promotes problem orientation, focus on practice, exploration and play, learner empathy, reflection and resilience, becoming change agents and collaboration and generosity (see more here).

eLearning champion mindset (Gachago et al 2017)

Our workshop (see outline and notes here) last week was a combination of a number of exercises / activities we designed over the last few years.

• The persona activity, an adaptation of Joyce Seitzinger's personas, which has become the core of all we are doing. Inviting learners into the room, and reminding us of our learners during each and every design decision we take.
• Gilly Salmon's storyboarding exercise, part of her carpe diem workshop model, which allows us to unpack in a course design team what works and what doesn't in our course design, shows whether we have aligned objectives / content / assessments and in general gives a really useful overview of a learning experience from a student perspective.
• Laurillards' six ways of learning and her learning designer platform, which seems to really work for our lecturers, to show the variety of our teaching and learning practices but also highlights risks of over- and underteaching, by adding up notional hours.
• Focused tutorials/demonstrations of selected tools lecturers can use to blend their courses (such as Kahoot or Plickers for classroom engagement, Electa Live and h5p for developing content, and Respondus Lockdown Browser and Monitor to create online exams)

Persona Activity

Storyboard

In total we had 2,5 days of creative, innovative problem solving but also a lot of fun. I think these workshops work because of a number of things:

• an experienced facilitation team, which can cover a range of skills and disciplinary areas
• the wisdom of the crowd, allowing sharing of experiences across disciplines, experiences and knowledge (again I was reminded of the importance of having both eLearning champions and novices in the room)
• different ways of working / thinking through the use of creative processes (lots of post-its and whiteboard markers involved)
• beautiful surroundings

I was particularly happy by the feedback of the not-so confident lecturers, such as this one:

Dear Daniela & team,

I just want to thank you personally for an amazing workshop. I have learnt such a lot!

As an IT-challenged person who can’t even really use the television without the help of my 16 year old – I now feel confident to really start including more Blended Learning in my course, and to encourage and even assist my colleagues to do the same. In this way I am sure I/we will be able to reach more students and improve the overall impact of our teaching and learning practices.

There is a saying: 'If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room’ – I was definitely in the right room…. I learned such a lot from everyone who attended and all of the facilitators.

Kind regards
F.

Looking forward to doing many more of these workshops next year!