Learning and Teaching in Action

Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

Manchester Metropolitan University

Author: Rachel Forsyth

Year of publication: 2015

Article title: Rachel’s reflections

Journal title: Learning and Teaching in Action

Volume 11, Issue 1

Pages 99-101

Publisher: Manchester Metropolitan University (Online)

URL http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/ltia/Vol11Iss1

Citation:

Forsyth, R. (2015) ‘Rachel’s reflections’, Learning and Teaching in Action, 11 (1) pp.99-101.

Manchester Metropolitan University (Online). Available at:

http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/ltia/Vol11Iss1

Rachel’s reflections

Rachel Forsyth

My name is Rachel Forsyth, I work as an academic developer in the

Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester

Metropolitan University.

Introduction to the course

Rod has described the course in the previous contribution. The

module has existed in one form or another for several years, as part

of MMU’s continuing professional development (CPD) offer. It is a 15

credit module (7.5 European Credit Transfer points) at Masters level.

I experienced the Flexible, Open and Distance Learning (FDOL)

course as a facilitator in early 2014 and Rod and I decided to open

up the module more widely. We felt that this would open up

discussion about assessment, and give us chances to work with a

wider range of people. I was also interested to offer it to our formal

institutional Collaborative Partners, as they find it difficult to attend

courses on-site. We don’t require their engagement in our CPD

programme - they can organise their own CPD - but we wanted to

offer a wide range of options.

My facilitator experience

I really enjoyed participating in this course. I felt that it had good

pace and levels of challenge for participants. Participation reduced

as the weeks continued, but I do expect this from online courses,

especially ones like this, which don’t require registration. All of the

people who enrolled to complete the assignment did so, and passed,

(n=19), so it was effective for those who needed it. In previous

occurrences of the course, these would probably have been the only

people participating, so anything offered to, and from, others was a

bonus, to me. Maybe other participants got what they wanted and

moved on.

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Some thoughts and observations about the learners

The group was as varied as it might be for any format of this course:

they were all teachers in Higher Education, but were from a wide

range of discipline areas; they had experience ranging from one year

to more than fifteen; some people were thoroughly engaged and

others didn’t seem to participate much at all. Website statistics

showed that people continued to visit the site until the assignment

submission date, about two months following the last webinar.

What worked for me

In terms of my personal reflections, the big bonus for me was

working closely with two colleagues. Rod and I do usually facilitate

this course together, but we don’t always plan in such a collaborative

way. Working with Anne Jones from QUB also brought another

dimension to this planning and delivery, as it’s a different type of

institution with different approaches to assessment. It really helped to

keep the content generic and avoided the temptation to discuss

everything in an MMU-centric way.

The same course ran in face-to-face mode earlier in the same

academic year. The mark range was almost identical, so there were

no apparent differences in quality between the assignments

produced by the two cohorts.

Participant evaluation was really positive and several students

commented on how practical the knowledge was; this is usually the

case for the face-to-face mode as well. The webinar recordings got a

lot of views (presumably from people who couldn’t attend live) and

several people commented on the value of having them available. I

don’t know if website stats have any real meaning here - people may

have stumbled across the site through Google searches and only

stayed for 5 seconds - but the site has had over 5000 views from 44

different countries.

Working with people from a wider range of institutions, both

facilitators and participants. I really enjoyed this. Assessment is a

messy kind of topic and there are lots of ‘correct’ answers - an open

experience enables people to explore a wider variety of contexts. I

enjoyed the tweetchats we had, and they got a wider range of people

involved, but they weren’t particularly valued by participants.

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Challenges

The online environment has some benefits – mainly, flexibility – but

the lack of physical presence is challenging. You can find other ways

to create and sustain personal contact, but I always find them more

difficult: I guess I miss that face-to-face interaction. I think it’s

because responding to people in the classroom is more immediate,

and it’s easier to process who’s doing what; with an online course,

you have to keep spreadsheets to check that everyone is engaging. I

worried about not being responsive enough. I ran my first online

course in 1996, so maybe I am just a slow learner!

From a technology point of view, we struggled to find a good solution.

Our Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle, would have done pretty

much everything we wanted: privacy in the community, file-sharing,

peer commenting, archiving, links to reading lists, etc. We weren’t

able to give access to the VLE to non-MMU staff, so we had to use

open software. That meant that we needed to use Wordpress,

Google Drive and Google Communities to get the same effect. One

person said “The variety of technologies used was interesting, and

provided a rich environment in which to study. Each of the

technologies was selected for a specific task, this approach provided

genuinely useful tools, but also created an overhead in terms of set

up and access.” Not everyone wanted to have a Google account, for

instance, or to share their thoughts in a public forum.

Lessons learned and tips for others

Keep the structure really simple. Our course is organised around one

question and one task to complete each week. This makes it easier

for participants to work out what’s expected, and for it makes the

tracking easier for facilitators than if people were doing a wider range

of things.

Record and archive everything for people who can’t participate in

synchronous events such as webinars and tweetchats. People will

look at those records afterwards.

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