What problems were being addressed?

• The need to continue providing staff with digital teaching support
• The limited amount of time staff had to partake in any professional development

Why did you choose to address the challenges this way?

• One of the key functions of the Learning Technology Forum (LTF) is the promotion and provision of professional development and support for digital teaching and learning and associated technologies right across UL. To ensure the continuity of emergency remote teaching, learning and assessment (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust,& Bond, 2020), LTF members collaborated to provide a range of professional development events and resources that were subsequently archived centrally on the LTF website. This website became a staple for UL staff who regularly visited it for clarity and guidance during uncertain times.
• The concise blog content on the LTF website would encourage staff to interact with the resource, accommodating a flexible, low-bandwidth, self-service professional development opportunity to aid them with learning to teach online during and beyond the quick migration to remote online teaching.

Who was involved?

The EDTL Team at UL, based within the Centre for Transformative Learning (CTL) , consisted of Project Lead, David Moloney, and student interns, Alice Hynes, Jasmine Ryan and Katie Martin. They worked with staff from the Learning Technology Forum (LTF).

How were the goals achieved?

When Summer 2020 came to an end, academic staff across the country were placed under a crippling pressure, as it had become clear that the Covid restrictions were not being lifted and teaching was going to remain online for the Autumn semester. With preparation for September 2020 progressively intensifying, the UL EDTL Team and the LTF recognised that staff demand for and capacity to attend synchronous online professional development workshops was diminishing, yet there was a clear and continuing need to offer staff support in a flexible, re-imagined format.

With this in mind, the UL EDTL Team conceptualised a concise and comprehensive solution to the problem: a new blog series focused on quick tips for digital educators, where the guiding principle was pedagogy-first. The blog’s aim was to provide an ongoing, informative and timely feed of quick, useful and practical tips for staff. And once the UL EDTL Project Lead, David Moloney, pitched it to UL’s Learning Technology Forum (LTF), the name, Quick Tips For Teaching Online, was chosen and the UL EDTL Project Lead began developing the staff digital resource.

The LTF boasts a broad membership from across UL, constituting a joined-up and collaborative community, whose key function is the promotion and provision of staff professional development and support for digital teaching and learning. This network would ensure the blog series reached the majority of UL’s staff, enhancing their digital abilities and optimising their opportunity to continue their professional development.

The UL EDTL Project Lead was provided with an account to edit the LTF website, where a new dedicated page was created for the blog. Initially, the UL EDTL Project Lead developed a blank schedule for the Autumn semester and invited members from within the LTF to self-assign themselves to given academic weeks throughout the forthcoming semester and to make post proposals.

The posts were to vary from quick tips to quick activities and posts that would help enhance or consolidate a digital teaching and learning competence. The blog would also introduce staff to institutionally available tools and technologies, along with additional signposts and links to helpful resources.

    Here is the UL EDTL blogpost development process outlined:

The UL EDTL Project Lead played an integral role in the blog’s development. Here are some of the vital tasks involved:

• Corresponding with each post author on potential blogpost topics –
• Providing authors with a Post Outline Template, developed to help structure and guide their writing
• Acting as a soundboard for authors post proposals and ongoing drafts
• Assuming an editorial role: providing comment, critique and feedback on drafts where necessary
• Inputting the post on behalf of the post authors to the LTF blog site and publishing the final post
• Promotion and dissemination of new posts, via:

i) a promotional email sent from the LTF email account to the entire campus community

ii) the @UL_LTF twitter account.

In its inaugural year (Autumn ’20- Spring ’21), 20 posts were published to the blog. They were written by 15 different authors and focused on a diverse range of relevant topics.

The UL EDTL Team wanted to ensure that the authors had a cohesive guide to follow when creating their blog post, so the UL EDTL project lead developed a Post Outline Template showcasing, among other things, how much time the authoring process should take and what was involved in it. The purpose of this was to aid prospective authors in making an informed decision on whether or not they could fit it into their busy schedule.

Here are the main guiding points:

• maximum wordcount (~700 words)
• estimated reading time (normally not more than 5 mins)
• accessibility (image alt-text and image captions)
• attribution information, etc.

The Quick Tips for Teaching Online blog afforded many benefits to staff, including:

• Posterity of posts
• Leveraging of diverse experience and expertise from across the university
• Opportunities for cross-institutional/inter-disciplinary dialogue between authors, readers, and colleagues
• Anecdotally, changes in practice resulted from the reading of and engagement with the subject matter of blogposts

There were also some challenges:

• A freeze of the blog for a significant period of time, while a number of UL-based websites were migrated and updated
• Scheduling of posts between a diverse decentralised authorship
• Reliance on author’s good will, with little incentive to make posts beyond willingness to share practice
• Promotion of the series,
• Largely unidirectional communication
• Maintenance of links in posts

References:

Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The Difference between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. EDUCAUSE Review: