Communication and Working With Others

Prior to being a Learning Technologist, I was a lecturer and this teaching experience has been very useful for my current role. However, a feature of teaching is that one is mostly working alone to develop classes and deliver them. Working as a Learning Technologist involves more teamwork and I have been fortunate in having colleagues who share their experience and knowledge.

Working in the fast-moving sector of learning technology, it is not possible to be fully competent in all different software and applications that are available to the staff. In my previous position, I worked in a team of ten learning technologists, and we relied on each other’s expertise in different areas when troubleshooting and providing support for staff. Currently, I work in close concert with one colleague, and through Microsoft Teams and email we communicate and collaborate with colleagues across the university.

In this section I will talk about two examples from my previous role – collaborating with colleagues to produce an adapted ‘ABD Learning Design Wheel’, and working across departments to resolve some important student login problems. For my current role, the projects on creating Support Guidance Webpages in the 'Understanding the Constraints and Benefits of Different Technology' section, and the work on building university-wide support for the Fix Your Content Day project in the 'Specialist Option' section, also show how I am able to work with others by listening and contributing to projects.

Description

ABC Learning Design Wheel

One of the most challenging aspects of the learning technologist is increasing awareness of the services we offer and convincing staff of the relevance of the different software that we provide support and training for. A senior colleague carried out a workshop focused on developing relevant applications of educational software, based on the ABC Learning Design Tools for Blended Learning workshop developed at UCL to help academics work together to rapidly redesign existing face-to-face courses to include blended learning elements supported by technology.

As we explored this technique we decided to adapt the learning design wheel for our college, and I led the initiative to do this. I created the basic wheel then shared it on Google Docs to get feedback from my colleagues, who added to and improved it (below). We included this in a short document that summarised our service offer, in line with strategic objectives of the college, to the different faculties that we were respectively responsible for. It was also used on our internal website to help staff choose which software or application they want support on. Later, it was refined and used as the basis of an interactive visual.

Student login

In my previous position, our college was faced with a significant challenge regarding hundreds of students not being able to log into the network and/or being locked out after initially gaining access. The lockdown had exacerbated this, because they were not doing their first login on a computer physically wired into the college network which had implications in terms of authenticating their initial login.

Our team was asked to assist the IT team in processing student requests by accessing their Outlook inbox and responding to them, and we were able to identify several typical scenarios. We communicated using video and messaging on MS Teams and collaborated on shared documents to produce templates for email responses and collate information.

I took the initiative of doing extensive testing by following the student how-to manual provided by the IT department and producing a detailed forensic analysis that identified several user design and structural flaws in the websites and login process, as well as misleading instructions in the student guide. I used Loom to record what I was doing, then exported the videos to Microsoft Stream. I summarised the testing steps in a document that linked to the videos in Stream. This document is shown below.

I shared this document with my team, the IT team and senior management. In the first instance, some redundant instructions and functionality on the website and VLE were removed, eliminating some of the issues. There were still some more deep-rooted issues related to scripting and authentication, and I worked closely with the IT team by getting prompts from them on scenarios to test and suggesting other approaches wherever relevant.

We were able to develop a solution, and I worked with IT to update their student manual that was distributed as a OneDrive document (below). Sharing links to an updateable document is an efficient way of sharing documents that may require edits over time.

Reflection

ABC Learning Design Wheel

Using a collaborative cloud-based tool such as Google Docs is not only very useful for asynchronously collating input from participants in a project, but I have found that it is an excellent way to improve the productivity of meetings. We are able to project the shared document and discuss it together, and make changes in real time. This improves the communication of ideas and is a valuable way of validating colleagues’ input.

With regard to the learning design wheel, apart from the basic concept and various applications that I had overlooked, I also learnt from my colleagues the importance of including accessibility design in the document – I was planning on including a table as an image, but they explained to me that this would become inaccessible to a screen reader. In line with this, I have also learnt the importance of including proper headings, as well as selecting the option to include headings when saving a document as pdf.

Student Login

This situation had many stakeholders. Administration and academic staff were frustrated because students were approaching them with login issues that they could not resolve for them; students could not access what they needed to learn; senior management were pressing for a solution; and IT were being overloaded with requests that originated partially from content on the website and VLE that was not of their making.

I was able to build on the work of my colleagues in triaging emails and identifying scenarios, and learnt a lot from working closely with IT. From the outside, it is easy to project solutions onto another department, but I learnt more about the complications of linking databases, managing active directories, synchronising different locations’ records, scheduling cron jobs, and other similar matters.

I was glad to have been able to contribute to the solution and based on discussions with IT I was also able to add some new elements to the student guide such as an explanation for students to speak to their lecturers if they could access their Moodle course but did not see any content there. This had been a source of frustration for IT, as it was beyond their control, and it was only through sharing experiences that we realised how we could address this issue.