Advanced Area 6: Blended Professional Development


1. Imperial College Scorm packages (using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous content to develop Blended Professional Practice in NHLI and DMDR)

During my time as an eLearning Technologist at Imperial College London, I had the unique opportunity to work with 2 departments within the Faculty of Medicine to develop Blended Professional Development courses. Working for the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College, allowed me to really push the boundaries in the field of Blended Professional Development, as I was tasked with rapidly shifting 50% of the teaching online for all trainee General Practitioners. Given the nature and scope of the field, the task at that time seem as nearly impossible to complete as some of the areas of interest included topics in MRes Biomedical Research, Experimental Neuroscience, Addiction and Neuropharmacology, Translational Neuroscience Laboratory-based Research, Research Conduct and Clinical Research Measures, Clinical Research Scenarios and Working in Challenging Areas, Human Nutrition, Diabetes and Obesity and Translational Medicine. 

In an attempt to rapidly develop all of the eLearning content in thematic areas that I had to no experience in, I purchased a group licence for Articulate 360 and I quickly trained a small team of 5 junior lecturers in using Articulate Rise. The results were phenomenal as my team of 5 academics were able to produce a large number of asynchronous material for all trainee doctors! The project was so successful that I was given a contract extension and a mandate to implement the same Blended Professional Development pathway in the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) at Imperial College London. Once again, I was able to very quickly identify a team of 5 young, willing and able junior lecturers that received a crash course in developing material in Articulate Rise and after 1-week, they started developping content in the following areas: Ultrasound Specialism: Echocardiography, Physics of Ultrasound, Innovations in the Management of Cardiovascular Disease, Food Hypersensitivity, Genome-Based Therapeutics, Human Genomics, Pharmacogenomics and Stratified Medicine, Bioinformatics, Genomics, Paediatric Allergy, Allergic Skin Disease, Cutting edge Allergy, Scientific Basis of Allergy, Advanced Studies in regenerative medicine, Pharmacology, Vascular Ultrasound, Echocardiography, Personalised Medicine, Research Skills and Immunology. (Please see section 1).

The second part of introducing Blended Professional Development to the group of academics focused on training all of the Doctors in using Live, synchronous tools to deliver live or recorded webinars. In an attempt to introduce the use of Panopto, I introduced a short blended course that was comprised by a face-2-face event, a webinar and some recorded material. The topic of the course was "Record your Welcome Video for the new Academic Year" and the main message that I was trying to get across to the academics was the importance of "Course Identity". By blending asynchronous and synchronous material to introduce the notion of "Course Identity", academics were exposed to a "meta" approach in using Panopto and others tools, that they themselves were called upon to use in turn to develop their own courses. The academics reported deriving added value from this minimal, bite-sized approach in using Panopto to create their Welcome Videos, as most went on to create weekely videos that were used as a flipped or extended classroom material. A second tool that I also introduced to the same cohort was Padlet;again via the same method! 


2. Kings College London (using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous content to develop Blended Professional Practice in the department of Economics)


During my time at Kings College as a Digital Learning Developer, I had the opportunity to work with the Department of Economics to help their members of staff transition part of Professional Practice online, thus developing a fully functioning Blended Professional Platform for the CPD courses. My task was to introduce university approved tools that could help academics shift their taught courses partly online. At that time, Kaltura was Kings College's approved tool for the recording and dissemination of asynchronous material. I once again used a "meta" approach of introducing all tools and training in a Blended form, so I used Kaltura, Padlet, PollEv and Microsoft FlipGrid to train my cohort of academics. (Please see section 2)


3. UCL London (using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous content to develop Blended Professional Practice in all FutureLearn and Moodle Courses across the University)

The third example comes from my time as a Learning Designer at UCL, were I was tasked to rapidly develop 5 FutureLearn courses and 2 Moodle based MOOCs. All 7 courses had Blended Professional Development in mind. More specifically the FutureLearn courses focused on these topics: 


whereas the Moodle-based MOOCs focused on:


The common denominator for all of these 7 UCL courses was that they were addressing professionals (Teachers, Academics, Doctors, Associate Physicians and Psychologists) and that their syllabus involved Blended Learning, as all successful attendees were given a 10% discount and partial accreditation in the form of module credits to do a full-time or part-time MA course at UCL.

Once again I coupled asynchronous material in the form of screencasting videos and synchronous training in the form of 1-2-1 tutorials and workshops (Based on the ABC123 approach) to provide with the learning design, digitise content but also empower the academics involved to develop their own content. Perhaps one of the finest moments of this project, was the "Record your testimonial" video sub-project/deliverable, were I was responsible for doing some capacity building in the area of Academics being able to use simple solutions to record impromptu videos for their students. During this project, I was also able to introduce the use of Microsoft FlipGrid, Padlet and also create bespoke video walkthroughs for all FutureLearn funtionality, thus intimately empowering the academics to populate with their own content each content area (Step) in their FutureLearn course (Please see section 3).   


4. Save the Children UK (using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous content to develop Blended Professional Practice in the ToT program and the Humanitarian Curriculum Project)


Perhaps the best example however of designing Blended Professional Practice comes from my time at Save the Children UK, where I worked as a Learning Technologist. During my contract, I was able to develop and deliver a series of synchronous and asynchronous material, webinars and face-2-face events to truly global community of experts. Perhaps the pinnacle of this role was the "Transformation of Training" program that was responsible of training more than 28.000 education specialists around the world in using blended learning tools. As the lead learning technologist, I was able to develop videos, design, lead and deliver online interactive workshops, as well as, train the trainer sessions that would made sure of the best possible proliferation of the program (Please see section 4). My ability to produce storyboards and design interactive activities within the Humanitarian Capacity Building Team, granted me a leading role 4 more Blended Professional Development programs within Save the Children:


Reflection


I guess that it really took a while for me to understand that Blended Professional Development is all about emulating the target environment. Once I realised that if you want to train academics how to incorporate blended learning fundamentals into their everyday practice, the best way to do this, is to simulate it by delivering the training in a blended way. Way before Covid-19 struck, causing a massive and abrupt shift towards fully online environments, I was trying to use technology in ways that would enhance learning and teaching. I can only recall the winter of 2017, when heavy snowfall covered central London with 2 feet of snow and all univerisities had to try and deliver their courses online for a week. But perhaps the best example of just how important Blended Professional Development is, was the Transformation of Training program, were I was trying teachers, rescuers and medical professionals how to deliver online courses and deploy online components in ad-hoc platforms during time of Humanitarian crisis. My participation in these programs really changed the way I approach learning and teaching, as my priority has been since then to maximise capacity building in key stakeholders and always look at the bigger picture/scope of the project.