Produsage: Cycle of Collaboration

After watching Professor Dennen's presentation on our Produsage assignment, I was able to restructure my plan in a way that I am very excited to share. I'm going to be a little meta here and design a collaborative professional development course on collaborative learning! There was an article on Inside Higher Ed. a few months back titled, Even Professors Hate Group Work, that keeps making its rounds on my LinkedIn and Facebook. The article is open and realistic, and it made me more empathetic to several viewpoints. Actually, if I had to sum up my entire professional career into one goal, it would be to see genuine and continuous cross-disciplinary collaboration from both faculty and students. As a faculty member, I once combined my English Comp class with a Biology course to practice descriptive writing. As an administrator, I spent an entire academic year working with professors from different programs to get them to form teaching squares and recognize core competencies between fields. And most recently, I've been focused on working with faculty and instructional designers to help them consider ways to build more collaborative assignments (other than just discussion boards) into their courses. 

The studies prove over and over again that collaboration can be a very effective method of improving student learning outcomes and retention in online classes. And while I understood the theory behind this and could easily throw out suggestions, I never really understood just how collaborative an online class could be until I was a student in this one. It's as though this class gave me an outline of exactly what I needed to know to show faculty just how engaged and active students can be in an online class. So, needless to say, I've chosen to design a course that centers on collaboration and, with your feedback, can be shared with faculty this fall. The course will be optional and can count towards professional development hours.

• Plan
• Build the course using a free Canvas account. I've done this before for interviews and sample course building because it avoids FERPA and access problems with using LMSs associated with institutions. However, once this is done, I'll transfer the most effective materials to D2L, our LMS. 
• Ideas and Needs
• Some scholarly readings to provide discussion of Web 2.0 and education: faculty will be expected to read these, and I will use either discussion forums or blogs for interaction. (Don't wince yet, that's only a tiny part of it!)
• Curation tool: faculty will be expected to spend a certain amount of time curating their own resources for ideas, strategies, and tools that can be used for collaboration in online classes.
• Presentation methods (asynchronous): so that faculty can share their findings with each other.
• Journal: There will be a reflective element to this course. Once faculty have selected certain tools to try with their students, the experience should be shared with their colleagues. 
• Social network: For this project, I will build in the use of Twitter, but for the one I will present, I might use Social, our University's social media space.
• Problem-based opening: To get faculty more engaged, I'll use a problem-based learning strategy to get them to consider all the ways in which collaboration can be used to increase student engagement.
• A listing method, perhaps using a wiki??, that asks faculty to make the pros and cons lists as they progress through the course.

Ohhh! I'm so excited to build this. In the past, I've always thought my collaboration courses were a bit sad in that, well, they didn't have much collaboration in them. I'd based them mostly on readings and education theories that support the benefits of collaboration. Eeeek. That sounds awful, doesn't it? 

So what do you think? Is there anything I'm missing or not considering? Once the course is built, I'll tweet the link to everyone to join! Thank you, in advance, for the feedback!

Blurred Lines: Microsoft Teams

Yesterday we had a team meeting about Microsoft Teams. We use Office 365 at work, and as a part of Academic Innovation, it makes sense that we are the early adopters of some of the tools. Under the the larger Innovation umbrella, I am part of a group that focuses on faculty development, and since we are a small group of four, we often try out new products before we talk about them with the whole crew.

We use a lot of what 365 offers, OneDrive, Tasks, Planner, Mail, and of course all the standard Word, Powerpoint, and Excel products. But we've gone back and forth with Teams. I don't think any of us are completely sold on it yet, but we're giving it a little more time. With my group, because I work remotely, we are always on Skype or Polycom and using OneDrive's share system to work collaboratively on live documents - a method that works really well for us. For detailed project management we use Smartsheet, and for just sharing our overall project plans, we tend to use Tasks. We use a lot of tools, and that's intentional. If we are going to tout the functionality of something, it stands to reason that we test it out first.

With all of these tools, we are still so undecided about Teams, which, at this point, we have yet to really see the value in. Most of the functions are easily managed using the other apps, so why add one more? Sure, we could argue that it's because it keeps our projects well organized, but we'd probably just link our Smartsheets. Maybe it's because it can house all the files we're working on? Ehhh, OneDrive does that and makes editing and updating easier. So what is it?

There is one feature of Teams, though,  that none of those others have, and perhaps it's why we're so determined to find a use for this somewhat clunky tool. In a lot of ways, it's like social media. It has a newsfeed, we can tag each other, share gifs, even upload videos. And when I was trying to see what all Teams offered, I came across the promotional video and was struck by this line: "What if people from different cultures and generations could come together in a more purposeful way?" Honestly, the advertisement is nothing short of moving. At its heart it's a business tool, but the experience Microsoft is selling is rooted solidly in collaborative social networking.

Because we are all in education technology, we know the value of social media and learning. And we often place open collaboration and communication at the core of what we do. But I think there's more to it than that. I think there's an organic desire to connect on a more personal level. Being able to see each other's posts, to watch real-time updates, and to comment on links and "like" our conversations -  even if they are all about work - are things that feel very natural to the people on our team. They make us feel more connected, less isolated as we are working from different zip codes - the same things we've said about social media all along.

The lines between productivity tools and social media are blurring, and it seems like a lot of good can come from this. For now, we're trying to get used to Teams to see what kind of functionality it can offer and how to use it in the most efficient way, but even if it isn't this magical tool, there's something about it that seems to be creating a stronger sense of community. And that's something I'll always support.

For anyone who hasn't used Teams, consider watching the promo video.