Engaging Educators in PG Certs: from content to online collaborative creation.

Julia Fotheringham Edinburgh Napier University.

Julia’s workshop looked at how we could engage PG Cert students in collaboratively developing online content by exploring a taxonomy of learning activities, mapping web 2.0 tools to demonstrate how the activities could be facilitated and by sharing examples and challenges from our own practice.

Julia provided two examples from Napier’s MSc in Blended and Online Learning

1. Students choose a unit of the module to lead as a group and they develop resources to support it and take responsibility for facilitating the discussion activities around this.
2. Students to identify online communities they would like to join, either professional, discipline or blended learning related. They add to a wiki explaining why they would like to join this community and then talk about their experiences of participating it. They then prepare a 5 minute audio presentation of their experience.
3. The third example from Napier was a Nursing project where students learned about healthcare in a country other than their own. They contributed to a wiki weekly by asking questions about a particular aspect of healthcare in different countries.

Examples from practice from the group:

1. Virtual reading group
2. Video blog from one student on a PG Cert that is shared and comment on by all other student.
3. The TEAP example of using Diigo to collect , organise and share useful online resources which feeds into the development of the reading list.

As a group we worked on how we design a learning activity for students in order to get them to achieve the following outcome:

Describe some of the key changes and current debates within higher education that are relevant to you? Our group decided to get students to vote on the top issue and then set up an online debate for and against the issue. I was wondering if we could use a similar technique to facilitate the wiki activity on TEAP?

Each group identified a key challenge as the differing levels of technology competence and confidence of staff.

Some conclusions from the session:

• If we favour content consumption over content creation we risk our PG certs being passive
• Failing to explore these pedagogies may be a wasted opportunity.