The power of (online) communities of practice
I have just come across this blog post W hat’s next for faculty development? by Alexandra Mihai and it has strongly resonated with the journey we have gone through over the last few months: from offering webinars and training sessions on using Blackboard and other tools for remote teaching and learning, curating resources and finally creating guidelines / rubrics for lecturers to benchmark their online courses and organising good practice sharing sessions. Image by Tim Marshall from www.unsplash.com What caught my attention though is her suggestion around the importance of informal communities of practice to support academics in times of crisis. One of my roles as academic staff developer has been to create networks across the institution of colleagues with a passion for eLearning. We call these our eLearning champions and we have written before about their shared characteristics, what we called an eLearning mindset , very closely related to the design thinking mindset. When lockd