What tensions exist in the roles, relationships and responsibilities of a learning design team and w Home : ALT's Summer Summit 2020

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Public Group Active 2 years, 1 month ago

Thu, Aug 27 2020, 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Authors: Dan Trowsdale

Room: Creanor Seminar Room

Type: Parallel Session (30mins)

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Description

Session Description

Responding to Complexity :
The multi skilled nature of teams required for the development of fully online digital learning materials is leading to the creation of new team working structures adding complexity to working relationships. COVID this has accelerated the need for relationship building and teamwork in this area. Such teams are an important part of learning design for digital learning (Lewin, C, 2018; Laurillard, D, 2007). For some academics this rapid change is a challenge, with research in Canada indicating that training and time allocation are barriers to the development and delivery of digital learning (Johnson et al., 2019).

Traditional teaching roles of the Academic, Lecturer or Teaching Fellow have for many years been central to the development of new and existing F2F modules. Typically this would be under the title of ‘module leader’. This role would have sole responsibility for the creation of content and delivery and student satisfaction. The role would include selecting teaching activities to deliver learning outcomes. It would also include the design of assessment type and criteria to evidence that learning outcomes are achieved. In the new digital age of education, this central position of responsibility is now being distributed across staff with the skills necessary to manage, design, develop, produce and construct content in the form of digital learning assets, activities and assessment.

There are tensions which naturally arise in any team based work such as how workload is shared, who leads and who is responsible for which elements. In this rapidly changing environment how have different organisations responded and what is the lived experience?

Questions for the sessions will be:

How are roles and responsibilities distributed across the team and is there an agreed, negotiated or assumed behaviour or hierarchy?
What tensions have arisen and how have these been resolved?
How and when is pedagogy addressed by the team and where does responsibility for pedagogy rest?

Outputs will be insights from the discussion based on the experiences of the participants. These will be in the form of notes and comments captured using online digital tools and will be made available to participants following the conference.

Session content

The session will begin with a 10 minute presentation of findings from a literature review on the subject to provide context. It will also include a description of Digital Education Service set-up at Leeds as an example. This introduction will set the focus for online group based discussion on the complexities of this area.
Depending on online resources/participant numbers there will be either;
– 10 minutes of break-out group discussion followed by 5-10 minutes of feedback from selected groups.
or
– 15 minutes of discussion in the central online space with 5 min key findings summary.

References

Johnson, N., Bates, T., Donovan, T. and Seaman, J., 2019. Tracking Online Education in Canadian Universities and Colleges: National Survey of Online and Digital Learning 2019 National Report.
https://onlinelearningsurveycanada.ca/

Laurillard, D., 2007 Foreword. In Sharpe, R. and Beetham, H., 2007. Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. Designing and Delivering E-Learning. Chapter 5, Page 78

Lewin, C., Cranmer, S. and McNicol, S., 2018. Developing digital pedagogy through learning design: An activity theory perspective. British Journal of Educational Technology, 49(6), pp.1131-1144.

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