The beginning, and working together as a group.
Assessment on this module is primarily based around a collaborative group project – the production of a learning resource. My team mates were Teri, Conor and John – all fellow northsiders, hence our team name, the northsiders.
Initial ideas for the resource centred on “something” to do with study skills. We abandoned this when we realised that previous years had already covered the topic. We then considered information literacy, but felt that it was too broad. During a class discussion, when we revealed our name and also the brilliant logo which had been designed by Conor, the class tutor Damian Gordon made a throwaway comment about having to do something related to the northside. At a subsequent team meeting we agreed that actually Damian’s suggestion was quite good!
We had a lot of discussion around the nature of the resource, Teri mentioned teenagers knowing more about America than they do about their own northside communities and this gave us the main topic – a resource for transition year students to up their knowledge about all the best bits of the northside. At this stage we also broadly agreed the overall aim of the resource, and started considering the learning outcomes. The aim was to generate a sense of cultural awareness and community pride, and to relate that to ideas of success and opportunity – particularly educational opportunity. As we pushed on with developing the resource we very much tried to keep the learning outcomes in mind – an approach that was influenced by Beetham (2007) and Laurillard (1993).
The dynamics of the group from quite early on were very positive and productive. We communicated very easily and responded very openly to group suggestions. Without having an agenda we had quite focussed meetings and were very intent always at getting a decision/result at our meetings, and just ensuring that there was a sense of forward momentum. I can be a bit of a procrastinator and it was interesting to observe other people very speedily making decisions and moving on to the next issue. Sometimes I would have liked to slow things down a little but felt that the overall wishes of the group were to move quickly, and it worked.
We didn’t appoint anyone to any formal roles in terms of group chairmanship etc however we each took on specific aspects of work as needed, and we all contributed ideas. I think my main contribution might have been to recommend Slack at the start as a communications channel – it kept all our thinking/comments in one place, files could be uploaded and shared easily, and questions answered. I also looked after the Google map and Padlet. And when we hit a difficulty with embedding short Q&As the very old-school suggestion of just having a page with answers on it was mine – and I think it works purely because of the catchy title “Anto’s Answers” and “Anto’s Question”. And also the nice artwork for these questions produced by Conor and Teri.
While the four of us worked very well together as a group I think that that might have been a bit of luck regarding our compatible personalities. I think were I to be involved in future group work that I would recommend assigning group roles and responsibilities, and also making the decision-making process explicit. Also, I would recommend very clear and shared directions re. collaborative work – the video we produced gives a good example of what can happen if parameters are not set: we all recorded short videos as agreed but some of us did it in portrait format, and some in landscape. A small, simple mistake – not even really a mistake – more a failure to think things through at the start. And this chimes with advice that was expounded exensively, both in class and in the literature around elearning development – thought, design and planning at the very start of a project are the key things, if you get that part right then the development bit should follow fairly easily.
All team members spent quite a bit of time generating raw text content – the descriptions of the people and places of the northside. While this was essential for the resource, I felt it might have been a bit of a distraction in some ways as it definitely took time away from what I took to be the main purpose of the assignment – the presentation of that content in a pedagogically effective manner.
Some of our decisions:
- agreeing the general focus/subject matter of the resource
- Considering the learning outcomes/learning objectives
- Considering an appropriate theory to ground how the content is presented and assessed
- determining broadly what the resource would look like, what format it would take (eg website, structured lesson etc)
- Agreeing a storyboard – essentially the template for the resource
- Agreeing the specific content to be covered by each team member, and researching /producing that content
- Considering assessment, and how the content matches up with both the assessment and learning outcomes
- Considering personas, and who the audience for the resource is, and trying to avoid stereotypes at the same time…
- Considering the accessibility of the resource, and how to make it as user-friendly as possibly for different users
- Determining when the resource was finished
The project also offered the opportunity to get to grips with some new tools – for me that included wordpress, Qzzr, Interact and Padlet. I also used google apps a bit more – learning how to personalise a map, adding text, images and embedding it in wordpress.
Storyboarding:
When we first started thinking about developing a website aimed at transition year student we as a group jotted down elemental words/images/structures to help formulate our plan. We were aware of the benefit of having a really detailed storyboard which could be followed precisely during the implementation phase of resource development. However, while we always as a group knew what we were doing, both in terms of our individual tasks and the overall aim of the resource, I don’t think we produced such a storyboard. During class presentations I was struck by other groups having made what looked, superficially at least, much more specific and script-like storyboards. However, my thinking is that following a very developed storyboard is perhaps more suitable for people who actually have previous experience of resource development and in particular people who know more about elearning tools than we do. Other groups highlighted the fact that their ambitions were high at the start, and that this fed into the storyboarding, and then they realised during implementation that the software they were planning to use was more difficult to master than they had expected, and also much more inflexible than they had expected.
With d’northsiders we quickly moved to the implementation phase – although we also strove to keep learning outcomes, basic accessibility criteria, and the ICARE model of course design in mind. We tried out tools quickly, achieving what we could and determining quickly whether that was adequate for our learning outcomes. I really think that for a group with limited elearning experience, and fairly limited software skills, that grappling around “doing” was a useful approach. I definitely see the value of storyboards and have to say that I probably quietly felt at the start that we should spend more time scripting out our plans rather than ploughing into them, but with hindsight, I think getting hands dirty with implementation and quickly finding out how difficult even simple things could be, was really useful. And this for my – and I think all d’northsiders – first serious attempt to develop an elearning resource, has worked really well. That said, the next time I develop a storyboard I will do so with the storyboard evaluation rubric (provided by Clare Gormley in class) as a guide.
During the development process we all contributed to “storyboarding” but Terri took on the task of writing up the storyboard, and has done a really good job. Terri has set out not only what we determined our resource would look like and how it would function, but has charted developments in our thinking of the ultimate structure of the resource.
References:
Beetham, H. (2007). An approach to learning activity design. Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: Designing and delivering e-learning, 26-40.
ICARE model of course design, accessed from https://instructionaldesignfusions.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/the-icare-model-and-course-design/
Laurillard, D. (1993). Designing Teaching Materials, Rethinking University Teaching-a framework for the effective use of educational technology, 181-208, Routledge.
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