Learning outcomes and keeping focus
I took on this workshop with at very short notice, as the person who was meant to deliver it was unable to. This meant that I had not been able to set the title or the learning outcomes but had to fit my knowledge to them. I found the title in particular problematic: it was called "Using the Web to Increase Impact", which I feel promises more than social media and the web could deliver. I was unsure how I could capture that title in my teaching.
Perhaps this was why, as the observer pointed out, the class felt a bit vague in its purpose and it wasn't always clear what exactly I wanted to achieve. The other reason for this is that I wanted to leave room for the participants to insert their own objectives. However, while I asked them to state what they wanted to get out of the workshop, I didn't then really use their objectives either.
The next time I deliver this workshop, therefore, I would like to develop a way not just to collect participants' goals but to use them to generate learning outcomes for the session.
Involving students in curriculum design has been studied on a broad level, at the level of the module, and found to be successful (Mihans et al, 2008). However, I wanted to do this on a smaller scale, and especially as this is not connected to a module or a broader undergraduate curriculum, I don't want to embark on a long process of consultation but rather to generate 'quick and dirty' objectives within the session so that the group has something to focus on that reflects their shared objectives.
Prince (2004) found that collaborative learning had a positive effect on students, and that while PBL as a method is hard to measure, it positively affected students' attitudes and ability to work independently - both aspects which are important for CPD workshops such as this one.
The next time I deliver the workshop, I will ask participants to share at least one thing they want to be able to do by the end of it. I will write these on the board and use them to guide the session. At the end of the session I will ask the participants to reflect on whether they think they achieved the objectives. The right-hand column on this page reports on how well this worked.
References
Prince, Michael (2004). 'Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research' Journal of Engineering Education 93 (3), 223-231.
Mihans, I. I., Richard, J., Long, D. T., & Felten, P. (2008). Power and expertise: Student-faculty collaboration in course design and the scholarship of teaching and learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2(2), 16.
Wood, D. F. (2003). Problem based learning. BMJ : British Medical Journal, 326(7384), 328–330.
Better and more relevant resources
Dr Doe's comment about the exemplars that I used in the workshop - that they were not always as relevant to the participants as they could be, and that I wasn't always clear on why I was showing them - offers an excellent opportunity to improve this element of the workshop.
She is right that some of the resources shown, though they offered a very good example of using the Web, were created through resources that would be unavailable to the participants.
Most of the participants in this workshop are usually early on in their academic careers; they are short on time and certainly do not have either the time to learn how to create attractive websites, or the money to pay someone else to. Therefore, showing them (admittedly excellent) websites of Amanda Vickery and Gilly Salmon was ineffective at inspiring change, because they were too far above the participants for them to imagine following in those footsteps.
As Vygotsky's theory of the Zone of Proximal Development attests, learners need to move from their current comfort zone into the place just beyond it, where they learn new things. Asking participants to envisage themselves having an elegant, custom personal website would be moving them too far beyond their current practice - rather, I need to identify resources that show people practising just beyond what my participants might be doing. For example, blogs and social media accounts maintained by early career researchers in their spare time; ones that demonstrate interesting or innovative practice but are done by people with similar levels of resource to that of the workshop participants.
I also need to make sure that the amount of resources doesn't appear too overwhelming - when compiling my list of resources I will write next to each one why I have chosen it and what it demonstrates. Having discussed with my colleague David Andrew, I will experiment with using Diigo, a content-curation tool, as a way to compile resources.
Then, when I am carrying out the workshop and adjusting it to meet the participant-chosen learning objectives, I can have my list of resources on hand, confident that they are all roughly on the right level, and select which ones I want to show the participants according to the skills I want to showcase - and of course I can make this explicit to the students.
Reference
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental process.
Icebreakers and encouraging participation
This is a very important aspect of this workshop especially: I've found that participants tend to come to the workshop with a variety of experiences and priorities, ranging from the beginner to the more advanced user who wants to refine how they use the web and social media.
In a more recent version of the workshop, I introduced an innovation to improve both icebreaking and participation. As we went around the class we asked each participant to introduce themselves and then to tell us the one thing they most wanted to get out of the workshop. I wrote this on the whiteboard and used it to guide our focus in the workshop.
This meant that I could address the quieter students individually throughout the workshop, identifying the aspect they had chosen and creating a dialogue with them. This helped them to get involved in a non-threatening way; they could participate by responding to me rather than having to volunteer information.
Having a written focus to the workshop led me to create a similarly focused page on QMPlus Hub, QMUL's e-portfolio tool. I created a page and filled it out as we went along, adding in links to useful tools as they came up in real time. This provided an incentive for participants to get involved, as they were able to direct me to find resources that they wanted to access in the future. This seemed to go down well: 50% of participants rated effectiveness of the trainer as 'very good', 25% as 'good' and 25% as 'fair'.
In the screenshot below you can see the page I created on that day- it is divided by the broad themes on which we ended up focusing.
If I were to run the workshop again, I would take down the participants' stated aims and put them on the page so that they could refer back to them. This would also allow me, and the participants, to add to it at later dates. I would also email the participants the link to the page afterwards: I made them aware of its location in the workshop, but one of the comments on the evaluation form said that they could not find it.