At a time when the cost of Higher Education is rocketing, I am very excited to be part of this new venture. Part of its mission will be to make Higher Education accessible and affordable (and of real high quality) at a time when it appears to be less attractive and accessible. The social purpose of that part of the business is something that I am completely passionate about.

I have been an online tutor for distance learners for well over a decade, mainly through my work on Sheffield College’s LeTTOL and Effective Mentors courses, and in previous roles, particularly at Warwick Business School, I have worked on the enhancement of traditional distance learning programmes by developing online resources, courses, tuition, support and communities. However, to lead the development and delivery of online programmes for an entire organisation, which in a distance learning context means being responsible for the quality of teaching and learning which happens on our online programmes, at this time, in this economy, is an opportunity that is too good to miss.

The fact that UDOL is a separate business tasked with meeting demanding recruitment and financial targets is another very attractive part of the role because it means that the learner must be at the very centre of the business. We will succeed by making our courses and programmes attractive to learners, by understanding and meeting the many different needs of our distance learners, by supporting those learners to achieve the qualifications that they need and want. And of course we have got the internet to help us meet those needs. So, what forms of content, of support and tuition, of peer communication will we develop and nurture online to guide and support our online distance learners?

Answering those questions will be a core part of my role which I can’t wait to get stuck into. There are many other key questions that we will need to develop answers to in order to be successful. Here are just some of the many interesting ones that I am motivated to develop good answers to:

• How can we make online distance learning at HE level attractive to school leavers? UDOL is not solely or principally about an offer for school leavers but there is clearly a growing interest in alternative modes of HE amongst them.
• How can we develop online distance learning at HE level that widens access to Higher Education?
• What are the organisational, contractual and financial models that we will need to develop to enable the production of high quality content and the provision of high quality tuition and support for online distance learning programmes across a university?
• How do we develop online distance learning programmes that will be attractive to the very web savvy young people currently leaving the great primary schools that I have been exposed to while at the National College – schools like Robin Hood in Birmingham, Hawes Side in Blackpool and Heathfield in Bolton amongst many others?

While the role definitely has a learning technology focus, I increasingly feel that it shares a lot with the headteachers and school leaders I have worked with and been exposed to at The National College with their responsibility for the leadership of teaching and learning across their schools. I’ve been very fortunate to work with so many good people who do that so well, so I’ll be taking a lot of their lessons with me. My e-learning work at the College has not involved as much programme and course design work as I have enjoyed in previous roles, so there’s also an element of going back to my roots in the new role. To pinch and paraphrase a line from The Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Black Treacle’: it’s time to walk the walk and not catch the train. Roll on January.

Here’s what we have to look forward to at the event:

Stories of practice

Above all, TeachMeet is about educators telling each other stories about their own practice, from a variety of contexts and across a range of sectors. Stories of success, stories of failure and stories of work in progress. Practice that you can emulate and adapt in your classroom tomorrow. Presenters at TeachMeet Midlands have signed up to give 7 minute micro presentations or 2 minute nano presentations about their practice. It’s a pacy, heady mix of narrative and learning.

Committed and passionate practitioners

Participation and attendance at a TeachMeet is entirely voluntary. Nobody is being paid to present. There are no keynoters. It’s a Friday night and it’s voluntary and consequently it will be full of committed and passionate practitioners open to learning from their peers, eager to share their own stories and extend their own practice.

The audience on the stage

TeachMeet is an unconference. There is no prescribed programme or recruited keynote speakers. The agenda is entirely blank until practitioners begin to sign up (on the TeachMeet wiki in our case) to offer to share their stories and make their presentations. When you attend a TeachMeet you are likely to be sitting at a table with one of the presenters rather than watching them from afar. The programme is in the hands of the attendees. The audience is on the stage.

Remote and international participation

If you cannot make it to TeachMeet Midlands you can easily follow the event live online as we will be streaming it live via a web conference (using WebEx). If you would like to attend the web conference, you can register for the session. In addition to a high quality ‘outward’ stream of the event, we will also have some remote and international participants presenting to the venue and to attendees on the web conference. Thanks to generous support from Dell, we’ve hired a cracking PA system so that we’ll achieve great quality audio out from the venue to the web conference and back from web conference presenters to the venue.

A world class venue

Thanks to support from the National College, we’re able to run the event at the College’s fantastic Learning and Conference Centre. We’ll have a tremendous auditorium, excellent breakout rooms, a bar, fantastic social spaces and even a deck over a lake as the location for the event.

Learning in the spaces in-between and after

TeachMeet is as much about the conversations and the connections as it is about the more formal presentations. It’s about the people you meet and the conversations you have over coffee before the kick-off. It’s about having time to talk with your peers in the break and over food afterwards. It’s about the connections and conversations that continue after the event in other online networks, via blogs and Twitter and at other events.

Good food

To nurture those conversations and connections after the formal proceedings are over, we have a TeachEat get-together immediately after the TeachMeet at the venue. Thanks to generous support from Channel 4 Learning / Espresso Education, Education City and Vital, we have a buffet prepared by the College’s catering team for participants who have signed up for TeachEat.

Curation of a record of the event

The stories and lessons shared at a TeachMeet are often too good to be enjoyed only by those who attend the event. So we’re putting in a big effort this year to curate a really decent record of the event that will be of real value to educators internationally, in addition to the numerous blog posts and images and stories that the event will generate. So, firstly, using a copy of Camtasia kindly supplied by TechSmith, we plan to edit a recording of the web conference into standalone videos of each presentation which we will host within an archive at ReelSurfer, with their generous support. Secondly, my very talented colleague Pete Clarke, who also runs Only Forward Photography in Nottingham, will photograph the event and share the images via Flickr.

So, how does that sound? Can you make it to Nottingham on the 20th? If not, why not join the web conference? Can you also help us spread the word to those who have never experienced a TeachMeet? Can you:

• Tell 2 people about TeachMeet Midlands who would not normally discover this type of event?
• Encourage 2 people to go to TeachMeet Midlands (or one of the TM5 events this year)?
• Bring 2 people with you who would not normally attend?

Pic credit: TeachMeet Midlands 2009 by Mr Ush.

I’ve led a few of these sessions recently and this blog post is a write up of one of those. A useful way that I have found of preparing for these sessions is to focus solely on the lessons that I have learned from the particular project or area of work and to note these down, as they occur to me and often while I’m travelling, using the Simplenote app on my phone. One of the lovely things about using Simplenote is that your notes are synchronised to the Simplenote service on the web and, when viewed on a browser, a page of notes in Simplenote is often handsome enough to be used as a presentation. So, your focus is on the content and not its presentation.

Figure 1. A Simplenote page in a web browser (Click to enlarge)

In one of my recent Friday morning sessions, I presented some lessons I had learned from having recently completed some online tutoring for Sheffield College on their Effective Mentors Toolkit course. The key lessons I listed were not necessarily new or groundbreaking. These were simply lessons derived from the strongest or most important reasons why I felt that course had been a successful one. Here is the list I shared with colleagues:

EMT lessons learned

• The importance of initial socialisation and shaping group dynamics
• The importance of pace, variety and balancing collaborative and individual activity in course design
• The importance of synchronising and re-synchronising group activity and attention / whole group communication
• Having learners lead the learning early is very powerful
• It’s all about the quality and timeliness of the communication, the collaboration and the feedback.
• Course design, assessment and facilitation must be in alignment. Together, they drive engagement and activity

I’ll take each of these ‘lessons’ in turn and make a few comments about each.

The importance of initial socialisation and shaping group dynamics

The importance of the initial socialisation of learners cannot be underestimated. Nor can the influence of the tutor in the very early days of the course in nurturing group dynamics and setting the tone for the course.

Initial socialisation ought to be an explicitly ‘designed-in’ part of the early course activities. Similarly, online tutors need to make time for, and pay real attention to, the timeliness and the tone of their very first acts of communication with their online learners.

You may have learners in your group who have never been part of an online course before or who have little experience of online collaboration. On the other hand, you may have more technically-savvy people in the group who baulk at having to spend a week working on icebreaker and introductory activities.

Explicitly designed socialisation activities are valuable for both of these groups, even for the resistant tech-savvy learners. New or hesitant or anxious online learners will appreciate the gentle pace and the opportunity to get to know each other and the technology before they have to use it in earnest. The impatient, tech-savvy learners can be taught, often by some persuasive interventions and direct messages by the tutor, that the needs of the whole group are important and that their skills can be valuable and put to good use to enhance the collaborative activities they are to engage in.

When time is taken to nurture initial socialisation and shape group dynamics comprehensively at the start of a collaborative online course, it can pay dividends almost immediately and thoroughout the course in the quality of communication and collaboration that takes place.

The importance of pace, variety and balancing collaborative and individual activity in course design

Getting the pace right, ensuring a real variety of types of task and balancing collaborative and individual activities within course design can make a huge difference to the success of the course.

You maximise your chances of satisfying the majority of your learners if there is a good deal of variety in the types of task they are asked to do (both individually and in groups). You give yourself focused periods where individuals can receive more detailed feedback by placing individual activities at key points in the course. You give learners the flexibility to plan and use their time as they wish by interspersing periods of collaborative activities, where the commitment to the ctivity requires a more regular input, with individual activity, where individuals can work at their own pace they wish as long as they meet the deadlines for activities.

The pace and the sequencing of activities can make or break the success of a collaborative online course. When you always have something different around the corner – either the opportunity for the individual to stretch out and follow their own interests or the opportunity for the individual to be supported and stimulated by the group – then you have a structure that can lead and pull and support learners through to completion. Good online courses will continually finesse the pace and sequence for fresh iterations of the course and they will grant online tutors the flexibility make some alterations to pace and deadlines in response to the dynamics of each cohort.

The importance of synchronising and re-synchronising group activity and attention. The importance of whole group communication

While a well-designed course structure supports learners and groups to work flexibly and asynchronously, I’ve found that it’s important for the momentum and focus and energy of the group to have key points where learners’ activity and attention is regularly synchronised. This is achieved partly by the placement of focused collaborative activity within the course and also by regular whole group communications from the tutor. On the EMT course, I made a point of sending out a whole group circular every Sunday evening which looked back at recent activity, outlined and repeated expectations of forthcoming activities, distributed a few nudges about deadlines that still had to be met and praised the good work that had recently been completed. To create a sense of where the group are at and what they have in front of them feels very important where learners are never brought together physically.

Having learners lead the learning early is very powerful

Designing your course so that learners lead and summarise discussions early on is a powerful way to enhance the confidence of learners, to reduce a sense of dependency on the tutor and to indicate that we are all learners in the group. Creating an expectation in your group that at different points in the course different people will lead group activities is a potentially powerful way of challenging learners and allowing them to flourish.

It’s all about the quality and timeliness of the communication, the collaboration and the feedback

It’s not about the tools and the technology. It’s not even about the learning design on its own. You can have great tools and excellent learning design in a course and it can still fail if the quality and timeliness of the tutor’s communication and feedback and the quality of the collaborative activity in the group fall short. It is in the hands of the tutor to make sure that neither of these happen.

Course design, assessment and facilitation must be in alignment. Together, they drive engagement and activity.

This is an extension of the last point and one which I felt very powerfully in this recent run of EMT, which I think gets these three elements right. When course design and facilitation and assessment are coherently and thoughtfully aligned, together they will drive the engagement and activity of the learner. When they are out of synch we make things harder for learners and tutors alike.

Figure 2. The alignment of course design, assessment and facilitation

If a fantastically-designed set of activities do not contribute towards the assessment of the course, expect learners to give them less than their full attention. Similarly, if a poorly-designed set or sequence of activities carry a heavy part of the completion criteria, expect some learner resentment and for the tutor to be overburdened at that point in the course.

If you are facilitating too much activity that is not assessed; if you are assessing too much activity that is not facilitated; if you are facilitating too much activity that is not an integral part of course design; if you are designing too many activities that are neither assessed nor facilitated – do not be surprised if engaging learners and satisfying tutors are much harder than they really should be. These design faults and issues are symptomatic of a learning design where the e-learning component of a course or programme is bolted on rather than integral to the course. Sadly, this is still too common in the design of many programmes.  When you have a coherence and a synergy between course design, assessment and facilitation this will drive and support the engagement and activity of your learners.

I think (and hope) we will see learning systems moving away from managing or controlling users and instead providing open learning environments that enable both formal and informal, personal and group learning to take place.^[1]

In April 2010, the National College launched just such a system for its members and for participants on its leadership development programmes. This case study tells the story of the development, launch and uptake of the College’s online network, and outlines some lessons that we have learned about the development and the management of this professional networking and learning environment.

This long blog post was originally written as an article for the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Newsletter and it is reproduced here with the kind permission of ALT and the Newsletter’s editor Morag Munro.

The National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services

The National College (originally called the National College for School Leadership) was launched in 2000 as a non-departmental public body to develop the quality of leadership in England’s schools. The College’s broad portfolio of work includes formal leadership development programmes, research, publications and the provision of a wide range of development and support opportunities for England’s 250,000+ school leaders. Online networking and collaboration across the workforce have been at the heart of the College’s work since it first took on the running of the Talking Heads community of practice for headteachers, pioneered by Professor Stephen Heppell.

The College’s remit has evolved over time to encompass the development of leaders in early years settings and in children’s services, and in the course of re-launching itself as the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services in 2009, the College also formally established itself as a membership organisation.

Procurement

In the Summer of 2008, we published an Invitation to Tender (ITT) for an online networking and learning environment to replace our well-known talk2learn system. Since the social software market was an emerging and rapidly-evolving market, we did not want the heavyweight demands of public sector procurement processes to prevent us from reaching the more creative parts of the developer marketplace.

This was not a tick-box procurement exercise. Rather, outlining a series of functional requirements that bidders were required to implement, our approach was to identify a series of principles and user-needs, to which bidders were invited to respond creatively. This approach allowed us to receive a range of creative proposals which we might not otherwise have obtained had we produced a more fixed set of requirements.

The three central user-focused principles at the core of the ITT were:

1. A simple and intuitive interface
2. The user in control
   For example, users must be able to start new discussion topics or set up new groups.
3. Discovery at the core
   The application should promote the discovery of people and knowledge and new activity within the environment. Users must be able to find knowledge through people and people through knowledge.

After 6 months of the tendering process, we selected Headshift as our partners for this development.

Initial research and agile development

We preceded the development phase by commissioning Headshift to conduct a brief initial piece of user-focused research to inform their solution design. One of the key recommendations was that if we wanted to increase the uptake of our networking and collaboration services amongst school leaders, then we needed to lower the barrier to entry; we needed to offer intuitive tools and services that provided rewards for small initial efforts rather than requiring our users to make larger commitments to online groups or to participate in large public online discussions. We will outline how we feel we achieved this aspiration in the description of our application below. We certainly feel that the success of the eventual development owed a lot to the user-focused research initially undertaken by Headshift. Their proposed solution design was informed by a close understanding of our context and our users

As we moved from research and solution design into development we moved into a phase of working collaboratively with the development team at Headshift, who are passionately committed to Agile software development (referred to from here on as ‘Agile’). We learned a lot from working in this way that we feel might be of interest to ALT members.

Firstly, removing the need for the production of extensive functional requirements up front, and introducing iterative, collaborative production of requirements and functionality, provided us with

• Real-time transparency about the current state of the development.
• The flexibility to influence the direction of the development as the product evolved and our understanding of it grew.
• The ability to reprioritise elements of the development in response to changing external needs and circumstances.

Secondly, Agile demands strong ongoing collaboration between the client and the supplier. It also necessitates that you have the resource and the capability to participate in the ongoing conversation, testing and decision-making around the development.

Thirdly, the ongoing documentation of and discussion about the development that took place within the project wiki and within the web-based, development tracking tool, Pivotal Tracker, provided ourselves and Headshift with:

• A real-time view of development.
• An ongoing place to finesse and influence the development.
• All of the communication around the development organised and archived in two major places.
• Tools that reduced the project management reporting burden..

Fourthly, we have been fortunate since the launch to be able to fund further development of the application in response to emerging behaviours and changing circumstances. And it is here that Agile has really come into its own. Working collaboratively with Headshift in series of short development sprints, we have been able to introduce and iterate both small enhancements and some substantial new features very swiftly.

The application

We launched version 1 of the College’s online network, a set of social tools integrated within the College website, at the beginning of April 2010. The core tools and services in the application are as follows:

User profiles

Each of the College’s 90,000+ members has an easily editable and findable profile in the system. A signature feature of the profile page, and indeed of the entire application, is the activity stream, which displays that member’s recent public activity across the environment. User profiles also display the public groups which members have joined and a list of the people that they have added to their personal network of contacts (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A member’s profile page

The user profile is a key element which makes our system the sort of “open learning environment” anticipated by Jane Hart. Your view of other people and of their activity is not dictated by your membership of a particular course or programme. Your co-participant on a programme might also be a member of a special interest group, they might have published blog posts of interest, or they might have contributed to a discussion elsewhere; via their profile that you can view their activity. Early anecdotal evidence of how our members are using the system suggests that user profiles have a real influence on how other members discover activity. They are a key ‘node’ in the network via which members can find other activity and knowledge through people.

Member search and social networking functionalities

Closely allied to user profiles, we provide the ability for members to search for other members. We also developed a lightweight social networking functionality which allows members to add other members to their network and thereby see an activity stream of their contacts’ latest activity. If a core benefit of a membership organisation is access to other members, then a facility like a simple online member search across user profiles feels like a basic and essential service for a 21^st century membership organisation to offer. Again, these are also tools which allow informal learning to take place.

Ask your peers

‘Ask your peers’ is a lightweight question and answer tool focused around inviting our members to ask their peers for advice on a leadership issue or problem (Figure 2). It features a simple, Twitter-like text entry box for posing questions of no longer than 30 words. It was conceived of as one of the features of the new environment that would lower the barrier to entry to the community space, almost as a tactical offering to encourage and initiate engagement based upon a low level of initial effort.

Figure 2: The Ask your peers tool

The use case we designed Ask your peers for, which we encourage and feature in our community management and editorial activity, is that of a school or children’s centre leader seeking advice from other members who have already faced a challenge or issue that they are now encountering.

Groups

Possibly the richest tool in the overall application is the groups tool (Figure 3), which comprises:

• A discussion space.
• The ability to upload files.
• The ability to create lightweight, web-based shared documents.
• The ability of group owners to publish notices to the group.

Each member of a group can start a discussion, upload a file or start and edit a shared document. We have also developed a specific version of the groups tool for use in our formal leadership development programmes which includes the ability to publish a structured sequence of learning activities into the group. Unlike the traditional VLE, and more like the social network, all of our members can set up their own open or private groups within the environment.

Figure 3: A group within the NationalCollege’s online network

National College discussions

The College has always run discussions and expert ‘hotseats’ on key issues facing the profession. National College discussions is an area, not unlike a blog, where we run these regularly-changing activities online.

Blogs

Each user has the ability to start and run their own personal blog. Blog posts can be openly shared with all College members or with specific groups only. Therefore, and this is a signature of the entire application, the tool can support closed, private activity in formal programmes as well as open, user-directed activity outside of programmes.

User engagement in the first 9 months

Prior to going out to tender for the application, we commissioned Seb Schmoller and David Jennings to conduct a small piece of research to help us in our decision-making about the commissioning and the design of the environment. Their final report featured the following quotation from an interview they conducted with George Siemens:

“In a network, two issues are key: i) ethos and ii) ease of use. Ethos is affected by who gets involved at the start, and by the tone set by early contributions. Ease of use is partly dependent on platform characteristics and partly dependent on what information the system captures and how easily found this is.”

Nine months on from launch in April, we feel that we can say with some confidence that the ease of use and the ethos (that we have actively sought to influence) of our professional network have contributed towards a really successful launch and uptake.

From the point of view of volumes of activity, we have seen volumes in the new environment that we have never experienced before at the College:

• In November 2010, the environment enjoyed over 402,000 page views, an increase of 142% on the number of page views for our previous environment, talk2learn, for the same month in 2009.
• The numbers of contributors to, and readers of, our National College discussions are higher than ever before.
• The volume of programme-related discursive activity is higher than ever before.
• Over 1,100 questions have been posed within Ask your peers and over 1,600 groups have been created.
• Our members’ engagement in activities they were not been able to do before – (search for other members, initiate their own groups and discussions, publish their own blog) accounts for a considerable amount of the new activity and it is on the increase.

While we have been delighted by the volume of activity the new environment has attracted, we feel strongly that success is not primarily about volumes; it is about the value the community offers to our members and therefore about the culture that is built up within the community. We are building up abundant evidence that our members do value the network and that their participation in it has real impact on practice in school and on their professional development. The two comments below are very typical of the sort of feedback our members post on a regular basis:

“The ideas on this forum have inspired me to put some of them into practice in my small primary school.”

“I have found it very encouraging to read through all of your comments. It’s great to know that there is a whole support network at my fingertips, made up of people who really do understand.”

In our work to foster this kind of culture in an open environment which is heavily oriented towards user-generated content, we have learned a lot about the importance of community management and of activity which nurtures its ethos.

Lessons learned about community management

The biggest change for our members, and indeed for the College, was that we passed a large degree of control over to the user to publish and to initiate activity. How you manage a community and nurture its ethos when you grant such control to its members is one of the issues that we have wrestled with since the first days after launch.

I would therefore like to finish by sharing the following suggestions which are based upon lessons I feel that we have learned about community management and the relationship between user-generated content and the cultivation of an ethos across a network. ^[2]

1. Anticipate the unanticipated

Whether your platform is bespoke or off-the-shelf, you will have designed or positioned certain parts of your service to anticipate and encourage certain types of behaviour. However, other behaviours which you had not anticipated or encouraged will happen too. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The unanticipated behaviour need not ever be negative. It is simply likely to be behaviour you had not set out to encourage. You need to be prepared for this, and therefore for lesson 2:

2 . Respond to emerging behaviour

Developing your service in response to emerging behaviour is good, solid practice for software development. It is also a sensible way to develop your approaches to the management of your community. In the early days of an online community it is very important to get a real feel for the tone, behaviour and motivation of your community members before you solidify your approaches to how the community is to be managed and nurtured. It is also vitally important to set the tone of the community where possible. Nevertheless, the behaviour you had not anticipated might be behaviour you want to promote or even behaviour you need to intervene to modify, perhaps because it sets a tone or creates expectations that you do not wish to nurture. Either way, it is important in the early days of a community to reflect regularly on the value for your members in the emerging behaviour you are seeing and to evolve your community management practice in response to that behaviour.

3. Create space and opportunities to feature, promote and editorialise

The opportunities you have available to you to actively promote certain content and to editorialise can have a real impact on the tone and the engagement within the community. While you can build dynamic views designed to promote the discovery of the new and the most popular user-generated activity across your community, the consequences of lesson 1 – the arrival of the unanticipated – mean that those channels and menus can be populated by activity that is not necessarily in the best interests of your community. So, make sure that you have some simple ways to really promote activity and content, some of it your own editorial, that is going to enhance engagement and take your community in the right direction.

A signature of several of the enhancements we have made to the environment since its launch has been to create more opportunities to editorialise and to feature content and activity. At launch, we had built into the environment a series of dynamically generated indexes, feeds and menus displaying the newest and most popular content and activity. Over time, as part of an effort to influence the ethos of the community, we have overlaid or even replaced some of these views of the environment with elements which allow us to editorially feature groups and questions and blogs.

4. Promote member-generated content as early as you can

Early on, when you have got some really substantial, stimulating content contributed by members – a great question asked, a meaty discussion begun, a purposeful group set up – give it your backing and promote it prominently to all members. In so doing, the members who contributed to the activity gain some recognition, the tone of your community is influenced by the authentic voices of members and the content promoted gains more feedback and contribution from other members.

These feel like some of the core lessons we have learned, from many others, in the early days of a longer-term effort to build and nurture a meaningful learning network that will have an impact on the leadership of England’s schools and children’s centres.

The screencast below provides a brief introduction to National College’s online network

1. eLearn Magazine staff and contributors (2010) Predictions for 2010 [Online]. Available from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=106-1 [Accessed 20/12/10]

2. These lessons and suggestions are taken from a larger set of community management lessons learned which I wrote about in the following posts on my personal blog:

Community management lessons learned – Part 1
http://stuartsutherland.com/2010/07/community-management-lessons-learned-part-1/

Community management lessons learned – Part 2
http://stuartsutherland.com/2010/08/community-management-lessons-learned-part-2/

Key points from Etienne Wenger keynote

1. The role of the steward is absolutely vital in a community of practice – the people who really nurture and build the community and who understand both the technology and the social, emotional and political context of that community.

2. We need to think about how people manage and experience their identity across a complex landscape of group memberships, communities and invitations to participate. Nobody has a singular professional community and we should never persuade ourselves that the community we run offers that to its members.

3. So, we need to think about how the communities we seek to nurture and build are really meaningful for people when they have so many multiple affiliations and memberships. What does our offer really mean for participants? How can we make it really meaningful for them?

4. All the people you connect with professionally, or who you seek to attract to your own community, are having to handle this issue of how they manage their identity / who they connect with / where they feel there is both value and a place that they feel they are accountable to.

5. Community builders, community stewards perform the hard work of building bridges between different contexts and practices. They are individuals who want to enhance / enlarge the learning capabilities of their various communities, by opening them up to each other.

6. Healthy, thriving communities have social artists within them. Social artists are exceptional people. They may lead communities, they influence the tone of the communities they interact with, they invite and push people to learn and rethink. They are collaborative and wilful, idealistic and pragmatic. We don’t have a good language to recognise the value that these people bring to their organisation. We need to recognise them, their value and contribution.

7. We should move from a curriculum-oriented education system to an identity-oriented education. An education system that prepares people to manage their identity as lifelong learners in a complex landscape. Do we give children practice in managing these sorts of connections?

Key points and lessons learned from the featured online community or network projects

1. Just because you have built it, does not mean that they will come.

2. The diversity and the number of connections in a network are absolutely vital to its success.

3. Don’t try to compete with, or replace, existing networks and communities. Try to collaborate and connect with them. You also need to meet your members, your audience, where they are rather than assume they should exclusively come to you.

4. Online networks and communities work when you really manage, build and nurture them. They require patience and effort.

5. Don’t build a bolt on – online collaborative opportunities must really feed right into and support what your target members are about, what drives them.

6. For your editorially managed activity, think of ways to bring experienced practitioners together with aspiring, younger professionals. Think of ways of making the activity satisfy both camps.

7. Think of ways to bring existing audiences into your audience, rather than always building your audience from scratch – e.g. run an activity for and with an existing group / event.

8. Emotive and challenging content, and content about ethics, generates interest, engagement and feedback.

Mediating Boundaries – summaries, notes and lessons learned

I was also lucky enough to conduct and record a couple of brief interviews with some great practitioners whose seminars I attended. The point of this blog post, therefore, is to collect these together beside links to some great summaries of, and resources from, the conference.

First, some cracking links. The SSAT have curated some excellent resources from the conference, including full videos of keynote sessions on their conference website.

Michael Shepherd has an excellent set of reflections on the conference in his blog post ‘Standing still is not an option‘.

Bob Harrison has a nicely detailed set of summaries and reflections in his post ‘Learning genie out of the bottle‘.

Dan Stucke has a detailed and persuasive summary and set of reflections on Dylan Williams’ provocative keynote.

My recordings from the conference

Using the wonderful Audioboo application on my iPhone, I was able to capture and immediately publish on the web the following recordings.

Neil Hopkin on the negotiated curriculum

Chris Kitchen on collaborative technologies for learning

My summary of John Davitt’s seminar on ‘Active learning in a world of difference’

The story of CancerNursing.org to date is the story of carefully-packaged but relatively uncomplicated e-learning resources … bringing high quality cancer nursing expertise to truly international audiences and to many audiences that simply could not access such expertise previously. It is a story of a small group of volunteers working alongside subject matter experts, working with negligible or no budgets, to share previously privileged or rare knowledge on a global scale.

This paragraph forms part of the conclusion to an article about www.CancerNursing.org that I co-wrote with Ray Irving for the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Newsletter. This long blog post reproduces that article, with the kind permission of ALT and the Newsletter’s editor Morag Munro

CancerNursing.org – a case study in international open educational resources

“I can learn at my own speed about a subject that really interests me, without having to get funding for a study day, swapping shifts or giving up my day off. It doesn’t involve me paying my £33 a day childcare fees, and I don’t have to put my make-up on, or even go out in the rain! I can do this when the children are snuggled up in bed! What more could I ask for? It’s even free! Thank you for helping a busy mum and nurse keep up-to-date!”

Zara Head, a nurse from the UK, submitted this feedback upon completion of her first course at www.CancerNursing.org. In a few words, Zara pinpoints the key reasons why the learning opportunities offered by CancerNursing.org have attracted tens of thousands of busy health professionals to enrol on its courses and use its learning resources: they are freely available internationally,; they are self-paced and offer ultimate flexibility to the learner, they are high quality, and they keep you “up to date”.

Zara is one of over 30,000 health professionals from over 130 different countries that have registered with CancerNursing.org since its launch in March 2003. This case study will tell the story of CancerNursing.org and identify lessons learned from the different phases of its development.

Phase 1 – Course development

Compared to the worldwide uptake it has achieved, the origins of CancerNursing.org are much more local and small scale. Ray’s brother Mark is a cancer nurse specialist who, in 2003, was responsible for raising awareness of oesophageal cancer amongst nurses in his locality. Mark told us how staff shortages made it really difficult to get nurses off the wards for training. We asked him why he didn’t provide the training online. Mark was interested and we offered to help as we were already experimenting out of hours from our e-learning day jobs at Warwick Business School with the development of a platform for building and managing courses. We set about developing the platform for Mark’s course, thinking at the outset that we were simply supporting a small group of nurses in Carlisle. We acquired the ‘cancernursing’ domains (which unbelievably were still available) and quickly realised that they would attract an international audience, so we resolved to make Mark’s course available for free internationally.

Six months later, CancerNursing.org launched, with its first course on oesophageal cancer, authored by Mark and a team of nurses and consultants from the Northern Oesophago-Gastric Cancer Unit in Carlisle. Within a week of its launch CancerNursing.org had a global reach, with over 300 learners from 4 different continents taking the course in the first 7 days.

At its launch, CancerNursing.org was a learning platform for the delivery of highly structured courses. Within a course, learners could:

• view pages of content organised into Modules and Units (Figure 1)
• record their responses to cases and learning activities within a personal learning log
• test their understanding and receive feedback in self-assessment tests
• use an Ask the Expert facility to send questions to subject experts
• browse frequently-asked questions and a glossary of key terms for the topic
• generate a Record of Achievement for use within personal development portfolios.

Figure 1. A page of content from a CancerNursing.org course

In the months following the launch of the site and this single course, the number of registered learners grew rapidly; we received a tremendous amount of very positive feedback and a number of subject experts from across the world offered to author further courses for the site.

Why would subject experts in teaching hospitals and universities want to do this? In addition to their genuine commitment to furthering nurse education in their area of expertise, CancerNursing.org also gave them something that wasn’t readily available to them in their home institutions: a place where they could freely publish learning materials. Publishing them with us often met their very specific local training need whilst also creating an open international resource, they would often meet a very specific local training need.

All of this changed the game for us. We quickly developed guides for authors and peer reviewers and in 2004 we established a charitable limited company, Nurse Learning, to allow us to submit funding applications, receive donations and hopefully grow CancerNursing.org sustainably beyond the voluntary efforts that had given birth to it.

From 2004 to 2010 Nurse Learning received limited amounts of funding via educational grants from a small number of charities (for example, The Prostate Cancer Charity) and private companies (for example, Napp Pharmaceutical). In March 2010, we were awarded a grant by the Social Enterprise Investment Fund to employ a project officer for two years to help develop the charity into a self-sustaining initiative.

In 2008, Staffordshire University incorporated six CancerNursing.org courses into a Level 1 15 CAT Points Certificate of Credit in Cancer Care, providing learners with a low-cost University-accredited qualification for their CancerNursing.org learning efforts.

At the time of writing, CancerNursing.org now offers 15 courses: some on specific (prostate and renal) cancers, some on specific procedures (such as managing syringe drivers), and some on broad areas of care (such as palliative care or caring for children with cancer). We’ve had over 73,000 course enrolments. Over 423,000 tests have been taken and over 2,350,000 test questions have been answered.

Lessons learned – course development

What lessons can we draw from our experience of producing these substantial, free, structured courses?

Firstly, we cannot overstate the importance of the basic, internet lessons and the benefits to humanity of free, global access. Our resolutely Web 1.0 open courses have brought cancer nursing education to nurses whose geographical location or economic or professional situation can prevent them from accessing such opportunities easily, or at all. Moreover, open online publishing has brought the courses to a volume of learners that simply could not be reached by any form of face-to-face delivery (and to numbers that larger organisations with substantial budgets have failed to achieve, either online or off).

Secondly, therefore, there is a strong, basic lesson in this story about economies of scale. One of the earliest courses we developed was ‘Cancer Care for Children and Young People’ which was authored by the Paediatric Oncology Nurse Education (PONE) group from the Royal College of Nursing. A core part of PONE’s remit is to look after the supply, the quality and the survival of paediatric oncology nursing education in the UK. The group were finding that there was insufficient regional demand to justify the funding for and the existence of their various ‘entry level’ regional training offerings. By pooling their resources to develop an online introductory paediatric oncology course they more than met the existing national demand, they stimulated additional interest across the UK, reached a vast international audience and all at greatly reduced cost as compared with what went before.

Thirdly, one of the strongest and most common messages we received from the volumes of feedback submitted to the site is that the model of the modular course, divided into manageable chunks of content, that can be studied very flexibly, is a very popular and effective method for delivering education to this target group. Nurses have told us that they often have to learn in the midst of their busy ward-based duties, and this often meant for 15 to 30 minutes at a time.

Fourthly, we’ve learned of the importance and the real value of providing learners on open courses with opportunities to reflect upon their learning and to evidence completion. Learners are invited at frequent points in their course to post reflections upon cases and activities to their personal learning log, and this has proven to be a popular feature. Even more popular have been the Records of Achievement for each course which learners can access if they complete all of the self-assessment tests within a course. Unsurprisingly, these features also rank as highly valuable where the courses have been integrated into organisations’ training plans.

Finally, one of the key lessons we learned is that course development is difficult and time consuming and that we could satisfy the significant demand we had tapped into by smaller, more standalone learning resources. We were devoting a lot of time working with authors to develop substantial, structured courses to our original model. This kind of production is difficult to scale up without decent resourcing and producing such materials on a voluntary or semi- voluntary basis, as we were, was an inevitably slow process. After a year or so we had reached a stage where we had several thousand learners registered with the site, giving us volumes of tremendous feedback, but we were only able to produce two or three new courses a year. Every time we launched a new course and marketed it, new registrations and traffic to the site would increase dramatically. We felt that we could meet the strong demand we were witnessing for high quality cancer nursing education material with resources that were smaller than the structured course. In the process we also wanted to give our members reasons to return more regularly to the site. And so in 2005 we decided to redesign the website and diversify away from only producing courses.

Phase 2 – Site redesign and live lectures

The redesign, which went live in 2006, allowed us to bring new types of content and activity into the site. We published feeds of cancer nursing news, we introduced a forum area and we made space for the publication of standalone multimedia resources. These came initially in the form of recordings of online lectures. Our approach to the online lectures was all about quickly capturing ‘content’ that already existed. We tapped into our international network of cancer nursing specialists to invite experts to deliver talks via web conference that they were already delivering locally. For example, wound management expert Wayne Naylor, delivered a session from his lounge in New Zealand at 8pm local time to an audience that included nurses from across the world.

Each lecture lasted 40-60 minutes and the presenter was ‘trained’ in using the system in two test sessions. Initially, we used DimDim to deliver the live lectures. Although low cost, it did not prove to be robust enough for our purposes, and we subsequently bought the more reliable Adobe Connect. Ray would upload and manage the presenter’s slides and moderate questions posed by the audience during the session. Each presentation was recorded and made available as a Flash movie on the CancerNursing.org website, alongside a downloadable mp3 audio recording of the talk (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A recording of a live lecture, published on CancerNursing.org

Of the 12 live lectures delivered, the largest audience contained 65 nurses and the smallest 20. Although difficult to gauge accurately, our server statistics suggest that the number of views of the recordings range from 800 to 6,000, and these figures do not include the number of audio downloads.

Lessons learned – lecture recordings

What lessons have we learned from producing and publishing this series of lectures and recordings?

Firstly, and obviously, they are much quicker to produce in collaboration with subject experts than the courses. They require careful preparation so that the lecture is adapted for the context, the lecturer is comfortable with the technology and the event is structured to make it valuable when replayed. Nevertheless, recordings of live lectures allowed us to produce new learning resources with greater frequency.

Secondly, when the lecture is explicitly organised to produce a watchable recording, the recording becomes an asset of much greater value than the original lecture. Not only can live attendees replay it at their own pace later; the recording always gains a significantly greater audience than the original lecture. For example, the wound management talk had a live audience of 30 and its recording has been viewed over 6,000 times. This provides another example of the simple, fundamental economies of scale we are achieving. And in our context, economies of scale really means enhancing the global provision of cancer nursing education.

Thirdly, entirely unlike the production of our more ‘traditional’, largely textual courses, the success of the lectures depended heavily upon the technical confidence of the subject matter experts. For the majority of the lectures, our subject matter experts were presenting from their location, with our support being provided remotely. Unsurprisingly, our most difficult events were those where our experts were uncomfortable with the context, the technology and the ‘distant’ live audience and our most successful involved international experts (like Bob Becker who has done several online lectures for us on palliative care) who were also very comfortable with web-based communication. In this context, that combination of subject matter expertise and web competency really is a powerful and compelling skillset.

Fourthly, we learned a lot about, and began to doubt, the cost benefit of delivering these sorts of learning resources with a broad range of subject matter experts, and as a result we resolved to shift our focus to delivering other forms of learning resource. Providing technical support to ‘non-technical’ experts worldwide proved, on several occasions, to be difficult, time-consuming and frustrating for both parties. After a year we decided to shift our focus, with a view to returning to online lectures when we could be confident that the technical barriers had lowered.

Phase 3 – Nursing videos

Since we began producing courses on specific nursing procedures, such as pain control via syringe drivers, we had received feedback from learners asking whether we could provide instructional videos about the procedures. We had always felt, and the feedback certainly told us, that video was a very appropriate medium for educating nurses about practical procedures, perhaps more appropriate than the step-by-step textual descriptions with images that we used in the courses. One factor that had previously dissuaded us from delivering video online had been a lack of confidence in the ability for all end users to easily receive and play video. However, by 2008, developments in browsers, plug-ins and media players, and the low-cost server technology offered by the cloud (we used Amazon S3 for hosting our video content) meant that end users’ technology was much less of an issue. So, in 2008 we produced and published our first instructional video on Peripheral Cannulation.

Our initial videos were all produced by Mark Irving, a clinical nurse specialist. Mark undertook the time-consuming work of planning, scripting and rehearsing the films prior to capturing and editing the content. As Mark’s knowledge of what worked, in terms of camera set-up, lighting, timing, camera angle and so on, increased, the production process became slicker and swifter. The videos were then published within the discussion forums on CancerNursing.org as embedded Flash movies (Figure 3). We have also published videos developed by hospitals and cancer charities. The number of views of the videos has been impressive, generally ranging from around a thousand to tens of thousands of views.

Figure 3. An instructional video posted within the forum area of CancerNursing.org

Lessons learned – instructional videos

What lessons have we learned from the production of instructional videos?

Firstly, the standalone instructional video, by its very nature, is a very efficient resource for training about practical procedures. Again, it puts the learner in control. It can be watched, stopped, started and replayed several times over very swiftly. Again, as the numbers above show, it is enjoys real benefits of scale: to have demonstrated how to dress a wound to 3,000 nurses would have required an immense resource in a face-to-face context.

Secondly, publishing the videos in the CancerNursing.org forums allowed discussion on their content to take place, enabling nurses to ask questions and seek clarification. This turned what might often be thought of as a static resource into more of an ‘interactive’ resource.

Thirdly, the way in which we published the videos in the forums as ‘social objects’, brought to light key differences in local practice for each of the procedures featured. These differences were not just international differences; they also occurred at very local levels, with two hospitals in the same geographical region differing in practice. So this is partly a lesson about the difficulty of producing open resources internationally when the domain that they cater for differs radically in different contexts. Moreover, we found it to be very difficult to produce videos that catered for many different approaches to a nursing technique while still making them short and usable. Any re-filming and editing that needed to be done following feedback from nurses in the forums was incredibly time consuming to undertake as compared with the textual edits we could make to the courses on an ongoing basis.

Conclusion

The story of CancerNursing.org to date is the story of carefully-packaged but relatively uncomplicated e-learning resources – the structured course, the recording of a web conference, the instructional video – bringing high quality cancer nursing expertise to truly international audiences and to many audiences that simply could not access such expertise previously. It is a story of a small group of volunteers working alongside subject matter experts, working with negligible or no budgets, to share previously privileged or rare knowledge on a global scale. At its core, it is the important combination of quality resources, that are relatively low-tech, flexible and standalone, being made openly available internationally, that has accounted for the phenomenal reach and the significant impact of CancerNursing.org.

A call to the ALT community

If you would like to support CancerNursing.org by volunteering your e-learning or media production skills to help cancer nurses across the world then we would be delighted to hear from you. This might be by helping edit or develop an online course working alongside a cancer nursing expert, supporting the development of the online community, or filming an experienced nurse undertaking a procedure. Tell us what you can do!

Please contact Ray Irving (ray@cancernursing.org) telling him a little bit about your skills and how you may be able to help.?

1. Know your readers from your writers. Find out about where your members ‘spend’ their attention.

You know from the community itself what the hot topics are, don’t you? These are surely the discussions or questions that are attracting the most comments and contributions? So, to boost the growth of the community, you should generate or promote more activity on these topics, shouldn’t you? Or should you?

Does the volume of contributions tell you anything about the volume of attention your members are devoting to that topic? Well, it doesn’t necessarily.

We had an extreme example of this in the National College online network recently. There was one discussion we ran which, on the surface, looked as if it had completely bombed. It attracted fewer responses than any discussion we had initiated since the launch of the network in April. However, when we came to look at our Webtrends analytics at the end of the month, we were initially quite staggered to see that this discussion had received the highest number of page views of any discussion during July, a month in which we had some topics which really flew and attracted substantial contributions.

So the lessons here seem to be: pay real attention to what your members are reading. There’s no necessary connection between volume of contributions and volume of page views. Don’t go chasing contributions only. Generate and promote content and activity in those areas where you know your members will ‘spend’ their precious attention. Perhaps you need to experiment with different ways of turning readers into contributors when it comes to these topics.

The fact that we only really discovered the success of this low contributions / high page views discussion at the end of the month, as we prepared some of our monthly reports, perhaps suggests a further lesson:

2. Keep a constant eye on your analytics – it is a tool for growing and managing your community not reporting about it.

A simple, basic, important web lesson: knowledge about what your members are interested in and paying attention to is gold dust. In something as fluid and social as an online community, accessing that knowledge and acting upon it are vital. The life and rhythm of your community won’t follow the rhythms of your internal organisation or your measurement cycles. So, try to make time to keep an eye on the data about what your audience are doing as frequently as you can. This will give you the ability to promote and plan new activity and content at the right time, at a time when a topic is grabbing your members’ attention, not just at the time you’d set aside to plan new activity.

3. Be agile in your community management

When what you are running is about people and communication and behaviour and the internet, and particularly when you have a team running your community, it can be tempting to feel that you have to have a set of Policies and Strategies all fully worked out in advance for how you will work and respond consistently to various scenarios, both positive and negative. If you feel you have to decide everything in advance you stand a chance of expending energy on ideas which will be ineffectual when exposed to the social realities of your community. And you possibly don’t give yourself the opportunity to be responsive to the actual behaviour, motivations and interests of your members.

So what might agile community management look like in practice? It’s small cycles of action, review and iteration, not long cycles of Policies enacted regardless. Let’s take a simple example. You want to encourage your members to fill out their profiles as fully as possible, ideally with good profile pictures. An agile approach would be to select and prioritise three or four tactics for encouraging this behaviour and then to execute them in turn over a short period. Let’s say that over a three week period you will target every new contributor in a particular space with a direct message which encourages them to complete their profile. Put your weight behind the approach you are testing out. Do it thoroughly. Review it swiftly. Where has it made a difference? Be prepared to amend, adapt or dispense with each approach and in the process build the real, current, useful knowledge in your team about what is really working with your members.

1. Anticipate the unanticipated

Whether your online community platform is bespoke or off-the-shelf, you will have designed or positioned certain parts of your service to anticipate and encourage certain types of behaviour. However, other behaviours which you had not anticipated or encouraged will happen too. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The unanticipated behaviour need not ever be negative. It’s simply likely to be behaviour you hadn’t set out to encourage. You need to be prepared for this, which leads me on to point 2:

2. Respond to emerging behaviour

Developing your service in response to emerging behaviour is good, solid practice for software development. It’s also a sensible way to develop your approaches to the management of your community. In the early days of an online community, it’s very important for you to get a real feel for the tone, the behaviour and motivation of your community members before you really solidify your approaches to how the community is to be managed and nurtured. It’s also vitally important to set the tone of the community where possible. Nevertheless, the behaviour you had not anticipated might be behaviour you want to promote or even behaviour you need to intervene to modify. Either way, it’s important in the early days of a community to reflect very regularly about the value for your members in the emerging behaviour you are seeing and to evolve your community management practice in response to that behaviour.

3. Create space and opportunities to feature, promote and editorialise

While community managers should seek to model appropriate behaviour and tone in their individual contributions within the community and in their various communications with members, it’s the spaces and opportunities you have available to you to actively promote certain content and to editorialise which will have a greater impact on the tone and the engagement within the community. While you can build the whizziest dynamic system designed to promote the discovery of the new and the most popular user-generated activity across your community, the consequences of lesson 1 – the arrival of the unanticipated – mean that those channels and menus can be populated by stuff that is not necessarily in the best interests of your community. So, make sure that you have some simple ways to really promote activity and content, some of it your own editorial, that is going to enhance engagement and take your community in the right direction.

4. Promote member-generated content as early as you can

A no-brainer really. Early on, when you’ve got some really substantial, stimulating content contributed by members – a great question asked, a meaty discussion begun, a purposeful group set up – give it your backing and promote it prominently to all members. In so doing, the members who contributed to the activity gain some recognition, the tone of your community is influenced by the authentic voices of members and the content promoted gains more feedback and contribution from other members.

5. Reduce the barrier to entry to your community

Not all of your potential constituency are necessarily comfortable entering or participating in online community spaces. If the first step into your community is to join an online group or to contribute to an extensive public discussion, that may be a step too far. Can you offer a type of activity or content or functionality in your community space that’s more lightweight, that allows a potential member to engage quickly and easily without laying themselves on the line or making a substantial commitment? It could be a vote, a tip of the day, a place to ask quick questions, a way to indicate approval of something or to follow or be alerted about something. From small acorns oak trees can grow. Are you making it easy for your members to take small steps into your community? And once they have, do you have a plan for how you might engage them further?