Certified Member of the Association for Learning Technology
6. Core Area 4: Communication & working with others Reading time: 4 minutes
1Candidates should demonstrate their knowledge and skills in communication through working with others.
by Association of Learning Technology
Introduction:
As a learning technologist, one engages in communication and collaboration with multiple departments, colleagues and stakeholders, both internally and externally from the organisation. As part of my day-to-day activities, I am required to communicate with our IT services and other internal departments and stakeholders, as well as external partners and system providers ( view). There are several reasons why these communications and connections are required, some of these are to help resolve an issue or inquiry presented by a staff or student, discuss changes to be made in the existing learning technologies to address a problem, implement an upgrade or change request, share practice, and discuss content materials developed for training and/or guidance.
Using platforms and tools such as Slack , Microsoft Teams , OneDrive , Outlook , and SharePoint , I communicate and share resources with colleagues both inside and outside the University of West London (UWL). For instance, since 2017, I have been a member of the West London Coders group who I met on Meetup.com . This group currently consists of 1392 members of Meetup.com and 302 members on Slack ( view) (as of Thursday, 11 February 2021) who not only share practice with each other, but also train each other on the use or learning technologies, programming, and share ideas of best practices. It is with this group where I learnt of Slack (our main communication channel), Articulate 360 platform and PHP programming .
Internally at UWL, we mainly use Outlook , Microsoft Teams ( view), and with the extension of SharePoint for specific requirements to communicate, share practice and policies, and deliver training as needed. For remote support to our users, I use Outlook to communicate and disseminate content/training or support via our helpdesk’s department email ( view). I also use Microsoft Teams and OneDrive to share content, collaborate with others in real-time, support my student mentees ( view) and deliver training.
Evidence
Excel Spreadsheet: Learning Technology Daily & Weekly Case Support Logs This document shows the number of weekly and daily support emails and calls addressed by my department. over 9,000+ calls have been addressed by me personally since Jan 2019.
In addition to the evidence given above, I am currently working together with our academic developers and 4 schools ( view) to deliver specific projects as needed. One of these projects is to support the preparation and delivery of training for our London College of Music, on using rubrics in Turnitin and Blackboard for grading and feedback of student assignments.
Additionally, I have recently been working with our Student's Union to develop a module that will be used for the People Like Us Project . The project is aimed at understanding students from under-represented groups and their engagement in Higher Education. They are then provided with support during their first 6 weeks of taking the module in their first academic year. And by the end of the 6 weeks, they are asked to share their feedback as to how they feel in comparison to how they started before taking the module. For this project, I was tasked to develop the module, ensure content is made available to specific groups as needed, implement achievements , review statuses, and content visibility features that are dependent on completion of other content before proceeding. All this is to ensure SU are able to track student engagement so they can provide any additional support to those who might not have engaged or to those that might need it.
Finally, I am working with all academic schools and other learning technologists to lead a project in training our academic staff and HPLs. The training is around scheduling sessions manually on UWL Replay to ensure recordings are captured correctly, and are made available to students to review in future. For this project, I have prepared a strategy ( download) to deliver the training, provide additonal support, and set communication channels through which all trainees can access support as needed. For these trainings, we have already delivered 4 sessions so far, with more planned from 25 May 2022 to 20 June 2022. And additional trainings and support will be delivered from late May onwards until the end of the first semester of 2022-23 academic year.
Reflection:
Collaborating and working with others has been a corner stone of most of my day-to-day life. For instance: planning a project with partners, planning a celebration with family and friends, deciding on a trip with a loved one, discussion of a group project for an assignment or other graded activity, and for projects such as those related to introducing of new technologies.
However, it a relatively new concept for me to work and collaborate with others in a professional capacity and/or setting. This has been a reflective process in which I practiced professional communication to convey a message, during training delivery, when preparing training and guidance, and more. Having had previous learning experience with professional communication, this has been an opportunity to apply what I learnt, in a real-world setting to create change, positive impact, guide others and for personal professional reflection in the workplace.
I have also learnt in practice why it is important to mix and collaborate with other professionals in their given areas of expertise. In such instances, I have been able to learn more from them on the subjects of my interests in which they have more experience. They have shown me best practices (such as how to write reusable code for web development and include accessibility features such as alternative text for images), introduced me to knew technologies (such as Slack , Articulate 360 , Meetup , PowerBI , Tableau and more) and where to find support for specific inquiries (such as Stackoverflow , PHP.net , Tech Communities like Microsoft Techcommunity , Support communities like Blackboard Community , Panopto Community and Microsoft Community ) and more.
Having learnt and experienced the importance and benefits of collaborating and working with others, I intend to pursue this practice in future so I can continue to learn from other professionals in their given fields, and create meaningful, and long-lasting professional relationships along the way.
As described in the revision above, working with other teams and colleagues in my capacity as a learning techologist has been a fruitful endeavour. Not only have I been able to learn the needs of my users, had the opportunity to investigate different technologies and their features that meet their needs, and supported them in implementing the tools to suit their purposes, I have also seen the positive impacts these collaborations have had on users - especially students.
For instance, training instructors on the use of our technologies to successfully deliver a course remotely, has meant that students are engaged effectively, they get the opportunity to learn in a fully online environment, and their instructors are able to track their engagement and provide any additional support as required to those who may not be engaging as well. The same can be said for the People Like Us Project , however, in addition to this, students benefit from the support and resources offered by our SU so they can engage fully in their course. Especially because they come from under-privileged or under-represented backgrounds.
For the UWL Replay training, I successfully mitigated several problems that have been reported in the past as far as automatic lecture recordings are concerned. By training staff to manually record their sessions, I ensured that not only are their lectures recorded, but they are also available to students when needed, and are captured correctly without any problems unlike in the past. All these enhance the students' learning experiences, while ensuring academic staff gain necessary technical skills to deliver their teaching responsibilities effectively.
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Specialist optionLast updated: Monday, 12th September 2022 By: Mrisho "M" Abeid Omary