Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLCs): Building and sustaining a webinar community of practice. Members : Annual Conference 2017

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Thu, Sep 7 2017, 1:00pm – 2:40pm

Authors: Rod Cullen, Chrissi Nerantzi, and Calum Thomson

Room: Harold Wilson (2)

Theme: Empowerment in Learning Technology

Type: 20-minute session

Description

Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLCs) are a series of open, informal, monthly interactive webinars provided for everybody involved in teaching and/or support for learning in Higher Education. Evolving from an openly licensed bite-sized, blended learning CPD initiative at the University of Salford (Nerantzi, 2011) into a fully online, webinar based, cross-institutional collaboration with an international audience, TLCs provide an interesting case study in the development and sustaining of a community of practice.

Not only have TLCs developed into an active community of practice but they have also built upon serval years of experience (Cullen and Thomson 2013) as a forum to experiment with and evaluate emerging practices in delivering interactive and engaging webinars. In this respect, the TLC team have supported several colleagues from the UK and abroad in delivering their first webinar.

The TLC team have monitored webinar participation, hits/views on the TLC website, views of TLC recordings as well as collection of formal (feedback survey) and informal (debriefs with presenters) feedback. More specifically the team has reviewed webinar recordings to assess the effectiveness of different approaches to webinar delivery.

This paper explores:

The building of an active online community of practice. This will provide an insight into the challenges associated with growing and maintaining both an audience and contributors.
Development of an informal organizing group involving individuals from several collaborating universities. A clearly defined organisation process for the webinars has proved to be essential to the success of the TLCs, however, this is not easy to maintain on a voluntary basis. Lessons learned will be shared in this respect.
Feedback from TLC facilitators and participants of the TLC experience. Regular reflection upon feedback received has helped us to refine approaches to organisation and delivery as well as the topics of TLCs. An evaluation of webinar activity design will be provided.

With this session we aim to share our experiences, encourage others to get involved with TLCs or even set up their own webinar initiatives to share practice within their own spheres of influence.

Nerantzi, C. (2011) Teaching and Learning Conversations. Flexible, bite-size staff development by, with and for academics, UCISA Best Practice guide on Engaging Academics with TEL, available at http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/publications/engaging.aspx, pp. 4-8.)

Cullen W.R. and Thomson, C. (2013). Using video conferencing technology to deliver Webinars at MMU: Participant and presenter experiences and implications for flexible delivery of learning, teaching and assessment. Learning and Teaching in Action Online 9, (2).

http://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/ltia/Vol9Iss2/1_cullen_thomson.pd [Accessed 27th March 2017]

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