Reaching 2500+ teachers via Facebook Live [18-17] Home : ALT Annual Conference 2018

Public Group active 9 months, 1 week ago

Thu, Sep 13 2018, 11:30am – 12:30pm

Authors: Andrew Smith

Room: Rm 2.218

Theme: Collaboration for Learning Technology

Type: Short presentation – 20mins

Description

Session Description

Presenting experiences of teaching and therefore reaching, a large cohort of remote teachers through scaling up innovation in teaching via social media. This presentation focusses on enabling remote student participation using Facebook Live as a mass webinar delivery tool – instead of ‘traditional’ web conference tools.

Session content: evaluation and reflection

While many describe an international skills shortage in network engineering professionals (Tech Partnership 2017) – there is an equally immediate deficit skill set amongst educators. Creating a long-term pressure point for higher education as well as employers.

Solving the problem of the skill set shortage is commensurate with its position as a Cisco Networking Academy Support Centre for the Open University (OUCisco). Reaching a community of 100+ educational establishments as well as operating as part of a wider national a global community of network engineering practitioners. With these two factors to consider. The OUCisco teaching team created a collection of free distance learning courses for teachers, covering the ‘introduction to networking’ and ‘computer systems maintenance’ courses from the Cisco Networking Academy programme.

With enrolments established for Feb17, Oct17 and Feb18 … numbers, far exceeded expectations, with a final total of 1728 (1130 in Feb17 & 598 in Oct 17) signing up for the ‘introduction to networking’ courses and 1192 signing up for ‘computer systems maintenance’ (Feb18). This forced the OUCisco team to scrap notions of using traditional web conferencing for the proposed teaching sessions. Instead utilising prior experience of Facebook Live (FBL) (Smith 2016) delivering scalable remote social media mediated educational sessions.

Each weekly session, offered on a Monday evening focused on each chapter being covered by the students (who are teachers). This formed a combination of screencasts, demonstrations, assessment preparation and remote practical activities.

Each course was delivered as an xMOOC (Downes 2015). With an average 75% from each cohort opting to engage directly with Facebook. Additional evidence from the participation statistics show a typical live audience ranging from 5 to 10% during broadcast. However over a period of 24 to 72 hours post broadcast the number rising to close to the broad population of the associated Facebook page (which has now increased to 1950+ likes and 2200+ followers).

This session will explore the technical affordances (Gibson 1975), in terms of flexibility, availability and the opportunity to deliver remote practical experiences of Facebook Live. As well as the successes and lessons learned around the demands of three large cohorts. Along with exploring interaction data and an analysis of the impact in terms of student performance on each course and subject. Finally comparing performance of the xMOOC students to those on more traditional study programmes based on statistical participation and achievement data.

References

Tech Partnership, The. “Factsheets”. Thetechpartnership.com. N.p., 2017. Web. 9 June 2017.
Smith, Andrew (2016). Periscope vs Facebook Live – it isn’t a grudge match. In: 2016 Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference (SocMedHE16), 16th December 2016, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, England.
Downes, S. From MOOC to Personal Learning. Oct 05, 2015. Revista FGV Online, Year 5, Number 1 69-77, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV)
J. J. Gibson (1975). ‘Affordances and behaviour’. In E. S. Reed & R. Jones (eds.), Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson, pp. 410-411. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1 edn