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“Exploring Technologies” in support of the TEL Colloquium

A blended digital and in-person approach to facilitating exploration of technologies for teaching & learning.

 

"Exploring Technologies"

The Longer Version

The TEL (Technology-Enhanced Learning) Colloquium is an annual workshop series where a group of faculty members gathers as a cohort for monthly workshops surrounding a central theme. The theme for 2018 centered around “approaches to blended learning”, where the overall objective is to design, develop, and then facilitate a blended learning project in one of their courses or programs.

In support of this overarching objective, our team from CNDLS (Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship) set out to facilitate an ongoing exploration of technology tools for teaching and learning to coincide with the colloquium as part of the Canvas Course supplementing their experience. As a member of that supporting team, my role was to collaborate in the design of our approach, develop supplemental resources, and to co-facilitate one of the early workshops. I also helped with some of the initial conceptualization of the approach for the TEL Colloquium itself. 

Team Members:

TEL Colloquium

“Exploring Technologies” supporting the TEL Colloquium

Development of the Idea

We started with a podcast

The initial challenge was to focus on the development of a podcast where students would experiment with technology tools and then reflect on our experience. This stemmed from a pre-existing desire by Dr. Yianna Vovides and our fellow student Katherine Grygo to explore technologies, however, we adapted as a means to help faculty shift their thinking. The idea being that this perspective could be a helpful way for faculty members to understand the student experience with technologies and some of the challenges and opportunities that are afforded by using various tools.

Roma and I, along with a few other student volunteers, ran a few meetings with “Zoom” and “Shindig” in order to experiment with how discussion groups could work in a synchronous online environment. Based on our experiences, we wrote a script detailing our experience together, and then recorded it together with Dr. Yianna Vovides:

 

Framing the problem

Throughout our experience, we developed an appreciation for using “Questions” as a lens for examining learning challenges, letting technologies and tools stem from those questions rather than the other way around. We reasoned that faculty members would appreciate leading with challenges and questions framed by teaching and learning as a foundation, and then letting those questions and the resulting follow- up questions branch out into further exploration and deeper thought into the affordances and constraints of various tools. We needed a way to help faculty explore technologies by not exploring the technologies themselves as a starting point. Rather, we need a way to help them explore teaching and learning challenges, with various technology tools acting as lenses for addressing them.

We refined our approach

So we came up with three questions or challenges related to teaching and learning.

  1. How do I design small group discussions in a virtual synchronous environment?
  2. How do I create opportunities in class to gauge student learning?
  3. How do I use course materials to design meaningful engagements for students?

Online environments can often lead students to feel isolated, unmotivated, and disengaged from their learning. In-class environments can often pose a challenge for implementing useful interventions with technology. We wanted faculty to explore tools and ideas with some of these challenges in mind, and using these questions we began to introduce supplemental resources for them to get started with their exploration along those lines.

For each of these questions, we created a page in Canvas where they could explore various tools that may provide an answer to these questions. The idea being that over time we could add more tools that either directly address or have a feature that can address the question. We could also scale exploration by adding more questions as faculty began to think more deeply about their learning engagements. With feedback from the other members of the team, I designed and developed each of the pages below along with their supplemental resources, some of which I will include in the bulleted list below.

The Workshop

As part of their second workshop as a cohort in February, I designed, developed, and facilitated a workshop activity for them to explore “small breakout groups in an online environment” using Zoom. Together we discussed the learning challenge and how it affected the student experience, and then invited them to participate in an actively participating as the students themselves.

Within a Zoom meeting, we discussed and applied some of the features in Zoom that can facilitate small breakout groups such as “Breakout Groups”, “Share Screen” and the “Digital Whiteboard” and other forms of shared annotation. Much of the discussion was centered around how to employ this tool with its affordances and constraints around their learning challenges. Near the close, I invited them to follow up by engaging with the online resources I had prepared.

See the agenda in the pdf below:

Challenges

Moving Forward

 

© Copyright – Randal Ellsworth

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