4: Communication and Working with Others

In my opinion, communication and working with others are perhaps the most important skills required for a Learning Technologist, on a few levels:

1. Delivering learning, particularly online and at a distance, involves effectively communicating content, information and instruction to students with clarity and conciseness.
2. Delivering blended learning is a multi-disciplinary task that involves academics, administrative staff and learning technologists working together as a team with a shared understanding and clear roles.
3. Working in a such an innovative, ever-changing landscape, it is essential to communicate with peers to ensure you are aware of and contribute to best practice in technology enhanced learning.

Communication is an essential part of current role on the CPEL project, which is a collaborative suite of programmes delivered by an alliance of four universities across Wales, of which Cardiff University (my employer) is the lead partner. This provides challenges in terms of communication as the CPEL team is split across Wales, and only meets face-to-face roughly once a month (and only some of this time can be given to learning technology issues).

I deal with this by prioritising for discussion only items that I believe absolutely need a whole team decision on, for example questions of online marking procedures or issues which effect the student experience. I also try and circulate as much information as possible beforehand to inform the discussion, and use a variety of formats for this, including documents and screencasts. I also employ collaborative software such as Google Docs, Trello and Mindmeister to allow us to work together on things between meetings; this has the added bonus of improving colleagues' familiarity and confidence with online collaborative tools. That said, some tools work better than others and I do find that colleagues engage more with tools such as Google Docs (which are conceptually relatively familiar) than, for example, Trello, which is a bigger leap from traditional tools. I bear this in mind when choosing the appropriate tools.

For general project management and communication I find this approach works really well, but I do feel there is a gap in the amount of informal training and support I currently provide to my academic colleagues because of the remote working and the limited face-to-face time. In my previously role I was used to regular one-to-one conversations with academic colleagues where we could catch-up on how they were getting on, they could raise queries, and I could demonstrate or remind them how to do certain things or where to find certain information; this has been lacking somewhat from the CPEL project. I believe this has contributed to a lower than ideal level of enagement with the VLE from colleagues, for example in tracking students, monitoring discussion and benerally having a presence online. I hope to start addressing this by making more use of personal capture software (Panopto) which we now have available, as well as Blackboard Collaborate Virtual Classroom softare for short training or ad-hoc demonstrations. I will also provide more guidance on what colleagues can (and should) do as part of their use of the VLE with students.

This touches on another important point, as in both my roles a challenging aspect of working with others, and of supporting technology enhanced learning in general, has been the division of roles and responsibilities between different colleagues. My approach is to embed as many online tasks as possible into the day-to-day business of the school or programme in question; I do this by aligning online tasks with the closest offline equivalent and therefore the appropriate person. With this in mind I produced in the School of Education at Birmingham a guidance / policy document which outlines which tasks should be carried out by academics, which by administrators, and which by the eLearning Team. This document (see attached 'TEL-Roles-Responsibilities') included some in-built flexibility but adhered to the basic principals that administrative and academic tasks (whether online or offline) should be carried out by either an administrator or academic respectively, and that the role of the eLearning Team is to provide advice, guidance and technical expertise in support of this. This document was ratified by senior management in the School and was an essential tool in clarifying the role of our team in the School and informing our relationship with colleagues.

Transferring this approach to the CPEL programmes at Cardiff University has been challenging, due to the different nature of the role (which is much more hands-on with three programmes rather than overseeing the eLearning provision for the whole school), as well as resourcing implications and the pressures of starting a new programme. This has meant I have undertaken tasks which I would not have previously seen as being 'eLearning' including creating assignment portals, distributing module evaluations and general student communications. As the project matures I aim to transfer this work to more appropriate colleagues, in most cases the programme administrator, and I am in the process of creating a roles and responsibilities document for the CPEL Programmes with this end goal in mind.

For larger projects teamwork and communication skills come into even sharper focus, and was very much the case during the Canvas Rollout project mentioned in Core Area 1. I managed this project in the School of Education, University of Birmingham, in 2013, and during it I:

• Worked closely with departmental heads and teaching leads to implement Canvas and arranged meetings with each department to update them on Canvas rollout and plan for the needs of their department. This engaged key stakeholders with the project, reassured colleagues about the changes, and identified specific areas of concern.
• Developed a ‘Who / What / When’ communications timetable that allowed me to plan and record communications across a range of different stakeholders and areas within the School. Based around regular e-mail updates, but also attendance at various meetings, this allowed me to keep on top of the project and ensure that information was disseminated and responsibilities understood. Please see the attached 'Canvas-Comms-Timetable'.
• Developed a number of e-mail templates for both students and tutors that could be customized and distributed by programme administrators and that contained all the introductory information needed about Canvas, Online Submission etc. Please see the attached 'Standard-eMail-Template-Canvas-Students' document for one example of this.
• Implemented an appointment booking system for one-to-one staff support at the start of term, helping to ensure we could provide 'ad-hoc' informal support for colleagues as and when required.

My work with colleagues on the Canvas Rollout project was acknowledged by a College GEM (Going the Extra Mile) Award, for ‘the outstanding help and support you have provided to colleagues over recent months during the changeover from WebCT to Canvas, working in a consistently professional way even though the process has been challenging.’ Please see the attached 'GEM-Letter' document.

For each programme or project I work on I am effectively part of a small team that includes academic and administrative staff working together to deliver learning and teaching. However I also play an active role within the eLearning Teams in which I work, and in particular work to ensure that each team is communicating effectively and sharing information. For example, in the College of Social Sciences eLearning Team at the University of Birmingham I created and structured a team wiki within Canvas to promote the sharing of experiences across the team as we transitioned to Canvas. This provided the basis for much testing of tools and processes, and allowed our experiences to be logged and shared, helping greatly during the short and intensive rollout process. I contributed a great deal of content top this site, and screenshots showing the structure of the site and an example page can be seen below.

In Cardiff I am currently in the process of creating a networking group for Learning Technologists across the campus - this is in the early stages but the basic idea is to create a regular, informal meeting where we can get together to discuss our work, share ideas, and support each others' professional development. I was keen to start this group because I find conversations with peers as being one of the most effective ways to improve my practice, and I believe that it is crucial as learning technologies to work together, to support each other and to share skills and experience.

So, as previously stated, good communication is essential not only with peers but with students, academic colleagues, professional services colleagues, peers and other stakeholders. This is not unique to the role of a learning technologist of course, but the variety and range of technologies, projects, and levels within the organisation at which Learning Technologists work make communication and working with others a core skill that I feel is essential to my role.