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Context
Context
In my current role I work with a broad range of small teams both within the university and beyond, in the wider language teaching community. On a day-to-day basis, communication and collaboration takes place with my students and with the teaching team that I supervise, who deliver the Language and Study Skills module. The last year has been spent working from home, which has had an interesting effect on what it means to work with others, and the relationships with workmates. Those who I once shared a physical office space with but with whom I didn't work directly with, I rarely hear from. The result of this is that modules have become siloed and isolated from each other. The small-talk and office banter, it turns out, kept many of us up to date with what was happening in other parts of the department and was a means of exchanging ideas. Conversely, as I describe in more detail below, new ways of working and technological tools have increased collaboration with my immediate colleagues and brought us closer together, which has had tangibly positive impacts on the work we produce. In the wider circle, I often collaborate with colleagues in teams such as Programme Design and Learning Technology, Academic Practice and the library's Academic Liaison.
In my immediate context, the past two years have seen the Language and Study Skills module develop at an unusually rapid pace, partly due to the pressures imposed by teaching under lockdown, but partly also due to an intrinsic interest in trying new tools and platforms and experimenting with new ways of teaching. In order for this process to bear fruit and result in measurable increases in learning opportunities for students, team communication and collaboration is vital. I have been extremely fortunate throughout this time to have been working with teaching colleagues who share these motivations. We have been in a position to critically appraise each other's work with the new technological platforms that have been highlighted in this portfolio, and suggest ways to improve the resulting teaching materials.
Stages of collaborative design
Stages of collaborative design
A problem that was solved through collaboration
A problem that was solved through collaboration
An example of how we did this in the 2020/21 academic year was to catalogue the teaching materials on a shared spreadsheet that allowed team members to add comments about what worked well and where refinements and fixes could be made. As can be seen on the example, the teaching team collaborated to put the materials through a staged review process. I would create the materials and inform the team when a lesson was ready for review, and the teachers would appraise the proposed layout of the live session on Google Sites and then play the role of student for the flipped Xerte materials which fed into the live session. These sections were given separate comment columns on the sheet, where teachers could add their ideas and observations. They would inform me when their comments were ready for me to look at and I would review them and make adaptations as necessary. Areas on which the review process focussed were:
functional (how easy/functional are the materials to use);
editorial (relating to typos, poor wording of instructions etc.);
technical (identifying broken URL links, images and text that don't display properly);
pedagogical (whether the materials make sense to teach and are aligned with the module learning outcomes and assessments).
When the materials came to be taught and students experienced them for the first time, we had very few problems, which provides some evidence of success of the collaboration process. Teachers reported that students were completing asynchronous tasks on time and in the manner that was intended. There were no confusions over instructions, links worked, planned in-class activities went smoothly and assessments indicated that learning of the concepts covered in the materials had taken place.
Reflection
Reflection
This process hit home the value and necessity of collaboration in the design process. Had I undertaken this project alone, the learning experience for the students would not have been as strong. From my colleagues, I learnt how to phrase discussion questions more effectively so that they would increase engagement in the live sessions. I also learnt which of Xerte's interactive features work better and less well in online language classes, and what adaptations need to be made when delivering the live session in a physical classroom rather than online. The teaching team also seemed to find the process beneficial. They reported learning more about the materials design process, and two of them went on to use Xerte to design materials when they were given the opportunity to lead modules of their own in Spring of 2021, and one of them reported using some of the materials templates that I'd written as the basis for her own module development.
There are possibilities for collaboration with other teams and departments that could build on the progress that has been made with our small module-based team. The University holds regular Xerte meet-ups, where members of other departments showcase materials they've developed and how they've solved specific problems and added refinements. An example of how my own practice has already benefited from this is when I borrowed a small piece of CSS code from one of the team members that automatically resizes graphics and panels according to the screen size. This has been a huge benefit to the accessibility of my materials.
Beyond the university, I have set up an online materials 'coffee morning swap shop', where attendees share projects they've been working on that have a specific focus on language teaching. Although still in the early stages of development, this has the potential to significantly enhance the number of collaborative learning opportunities as the attendees come from a diverse range of technical backgrounds. One area I'm hoping that I can personally develop in is that of page layout, and the art of getting an appropriate balance of content and white space on a page. This not only makes projects and materials visually more appealing, it also helps ease cognitive load on the user and ensure information is better retained.
Opportunities that I have not yet explored exist within the University's own training and CPD provision. Tuition on coding, script and graphics manipulation run on 'Digital Wednesdays', which are workshops for staff run by specialists in the field.
The benefits of asynchronous communication
The benefits of asynchronous communication
A key ingredient in the success of the collaboration described above was the use of asynchronous communication. The project took place in the first few months of lockdown, so we were working as a distributed team; however, the advantages of working with a group communication thread quickly became apparent.
Information, documents and material can be integrated into the conversation via embedded links.
Communication becomes a stream rather than a series of packets.
Responses and contributions can be time-delayed, which allows for consideration and reflection.
Collaboration no longer means interrupting something else that team members might be working on.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it is clear that these are benefits that are not possible when communication takes place face to face. One area for future collaboration that I have not explored is setting up a Slack group with the wider language teaching community and using asynchronous communication to collaborate on projects and share ideas.
This is an example of how communication took place between team members.
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