NPDF Domain 3
I’ll take 3.4, Alex.
An excellent project I’ve undertaken recently to develop skills in curriculum team discussion and on-line forums/ communities is for the upcoming, revamped Rudai 23 programme. In advance of the Rudai team running the programme, we have to put it together! So this involves the creation of a curriculum for an online continuous professional development course. The curriculum team currently consists of a team of four, all of whom work for different institutions from one another that are, in fact, cross-sector as well; meanwhile, not all of us are in the same city.
In proceeding we need to take advantage of both online collaboration technologies as well as the opportunities that we do have to be together in a room. We recently got together to put together the list of lessons we wanted to include in our programme, as well as figure out how we wanted to embed a sequence of Digital Badges.
Once we had a draft of the programme, we took it back to our virtual project management environment, which is Basecamp. In Basecamp, we had a discussion with one another that consisted of a review of our draft into a more formal draft ready to circulate to others.
The sequence involved, on the one hand, being aware of the communicative resources available to us given our distributed structure -- but one that nonetheless affords occasional meetings in person. We maximized the value of that in-person interaction by setting goals and using a collaborative work-place approach, particularly the use of colored stickies on a whiteboard which we then rearranged as we discussed the programme.
Awareness not only of Basecamp, or, more generically, of online project management tools, was essential. This also entails becoming au fait with the communicative affordances of this tool, and coming to grips with how to communicate in as clear as possible over its particular channels.
In the past I’ve had the opportunity to do a fair bit of peer observation, but have not done a lot of it lately. A question is how to undertake this given that a lot of my teaching is going to be done in virtual environments. What are some examples of peer review of online teaching?
