Projects – Page 10 – Digital Learning Dispatches

By Orna Farrell

Over the next few weeks, the NIDL team involved in the #Openteach project funded by the National Forum will be publishing a series of blog posts reflecting on facilitating and participating in the first run of their free online course offered in March 2020. This blog series will be written by the course facilitators and participants and you can read the full series on the #Openteach website.

My highlights

pasted image 0.png As the project is nearly finished, I thought I would share and reflect on my highlights of working on the #Openteach project over the past year. One of the major milestones was the publication and launch of our literature review of online teaching and approaches to professional development for part-time online educators. This report called Teaching online is different: Critical perspectives from the literature was launched at the World Conference on Online Learning in November 2019. The report was so well received at the conference, printed copies became a precious commodity and the Minister for Higher Education Mary Mitchell O’Connor mentioned it in her speech.

Go Team!

pasted image 0-1.png Another highlight for me has been working with the amazing #Openteach project team. It’s rare to find a group of people that are easy and fun to work with while being productive and really effective! During the two weeks facilitating the #openteach course, although we were very busy facilitating such a large cohort, we had a lot of craic!

Course design is fun

I really enjoyed collaboratively designing the #Openteach course. Starting with the interactive ABC learning design workshop.

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Then acting on that design plan and making it a reality. The idea for a scenario based approach really resonated with me and was realised in three online educator dilemmas in the course. Getting the scenarios right took a lot of work, there was about five drafts of the first scenario Eimears dilemma as we got to grips with using Videoscribe.

450 participants….eekk!

The first run of the course oddly coincided with the Corona virus pandemic. So we went from having about 150 participants to 450 in the space of a few days, as educators were thrust into online teaching at short notice and really needed some support. Despite the big numbers, the vibe from participants and facilitators seems positive.

I really enjoyed the strong interaction by participants and the intensity of engagement, although we haven’t finished the evaluation yet! The two live sessions were really fun and interactive.

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Concluding thoughts

It feels very strange to be nearly finished the #Openteach project, it has been exciting, interesting and a very satisfying experience and I hope we have supported people to develop their understanding of teaching online.

This is the second post in a series describing some of the recent externally funded projects secured by the NIDL team at Dublin City University (DCU). In partnership with Tampere University of Applied Sciences, the NIDL was successful in securing almost €1m of external funding for a project intended to promote equity and access to higher education through Open and Distance Learning (ODL). Known as the BUKA Project, the aim is to help enable increased access to higher education for people in rural and remote regions as well as those with diverse backgrounds (e.g. mature age students, working students, first-in-family students, students with learning difficulties) in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Local partner universities include:

New NIDL Small All Partner Countries belong to Region 6, Asia. When designing the project, special care has been taken to involve the key decision makers in all the partnering universities as key staff in the BUKA project. This is to ensure that the project deliverables align with local institutional priorities and the project team helps to develop local solutions for local problems.

This European funded project falls under Project Category 2, “Improving Management and Operation of Higher Education Institutions”, and, more specifically, under “Equity, Access to, and Democratisation of Higher Education”, including disadvantaged groups and regions.

The specific objectives of the project include:

Building the capacity of teaching, technical and instructional design staff in the partner HEIs in inclusive instructional design and learning analytics;
Improving learner engagement and retention through inclusive instructional design and learning analytics;
Improving pedagogical and technical accessibility of online and blended learning materials; and,
Providing more effective and personalised support for online distance learners in partner HEIs.

The first project meeting takes place in Malaysia in early February 2020 but members of the project team will also meet up at November’s ICDE World Conference on Online Learning in Dublin.