Blended Learning: One Year In

Yesterday, it was 1 year to the day since I started as Blended Learning Fellow at the University of Winchester, and rather than looking at my rather terrifying “to do” list, I thought I’d celebrate what I have done. My contract was 0.2 (1 day per week), until 2 months ago, where I have 12 months at 0.4!

• Building up an extensive set of material on the internal ‘Learning Network Blended Learning Pages’ (Moodle-based, which I have had to learn), which 152 people are now following (out of 200 academics).
• Learning the various Wimba products, writing strategy, promoting them (to staff & students) & training people in using them. Member of the Wimba Working Group, including chairing some sessions. Providing feedback to ITS and to our Wimba contact.
• On the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee, and the Learning Network Working Group.
• Learnt how to use Sharepoint for the new University website.
• Set up a timetable of Workshops, promoted, written & taught
• Presentations to all four Faculties re: Blended Learning, plus lots of smaller meetings & training sessions.
• Attended CET Lunches, and L&T Development Days, including presenting material on SkillsNet (a separate project for which I was funded).
• Set up Facebook Group and Twitter feeds, both of which need more work!
• Dealing with many many emails…
• Spent time in Second Life, and met with JISC people, in-life and IRL.
• Learning how to use ‘Clickers’, ‘Personal Response Systems’
• Followed FOTE09 online (October 2009)
• JISC E-Learning Fair (November 2009)
• JISC Innovating E-Learning Online (November 2009)
• Followed Ascilite online (December 2009)
• LLAS E-Learning Event (January 2010)
• Presented JISC Webinar on Twitter (March 2010)
• ‘Collaborative Enhancement in Teaching’ Lunch on ‘The 21st Century Learner‘ at short notice (March 2010)
• JISC Event (April 2010)
• Plymouth E-Learning Conference (April 2010), including presenting ‘Snow, Floods, Swine Flu, Terrorist Threats: Keep Calm and Carry On‘
• Undertaken surveys with staff & students re: their attitudes to Blended Learning/Twitter
• Live Blogging from International Blended Learning Conference (June 2010), including presenting ‘Twitter for Communities of Practice‘
• Set up blog ‘Blended Learning at the University of Winchester‘ (July 2010)
• Learning Literacies in a Digital Age event (September 2010)
• Working on the JISC-funded EMBED-IT Project (July 2010 onwards), with some extra funding/hours.
• Attending a few other events, e.g. Faculty BLS, Rosie Miles.
• Keeping an eye on digital stories in THE.
• Completing 2 out of 3 assignments for PGCLTHE, including the steps I’ve taken to develop a Blended Learning Community of Practice
• 980 followers on my Social Media in Education, Life & the Christian space Twitter account @digitalfprint, made some great connections through there.

No wonder I feel tired, but it looks good to see a list in black & white!

What Next?

• Continue training, talking, promoting, sessions, etc. and plan out my conferences for 2010/11
• Will be setting up a Wiki on Monday 4th October, in which staff can put forward case studies, tips & tricks, and be honest (internal viewing only), and identify material suitable for the external blog.
• Asked to be a “Super-Delegate” for JISC Online Conference Innovating e-Learning 2010 (October 2010)
• Arranged a couple of external speakers to visit the University, and will be running a ‘Drop-In-Day’ (November 2010) to allow people to come and have a go with various tech-tools.
• Turn ‘Twitter for Communities of Practice‘ into a journal article, with my co-author David Rush
• Assuming that I’ve passed my ‘Blended Learning’ module on the PGCLTHE, I’ll be teaching it next semester (that’s extra hours though!)
• Learn to film/produce “OK” videos to demonstrate a number of aspects of Blended Learning
• Identify appropriate funding streams from e.g. JISC.

Now I just need some time to actually read some of the many papers that I’ve identified would be useful to read.