2004 Spring Focus Session

Empowering Institutional Communities of Practice to Transform Teaching and Learning
March 17, 2004 – April 7, 2004

Intended Participants

While open to individuals, this online focus session is designed to help higher education institutional teams in particular that have been tasked to plan, implement and deliver projects, programs or services to transform teaching and learning with technology and who wish to use communities of practice - both virtual and face-to-face - as a strategy to accomplish this transformation. Institutional roles that team members might represent include (a mixture of roles is encouraged for effective teams):

• Faculty and faculty-development specialists wanting to learn a new strategy and approach to engaging and supporting faculty in focusing on the scholarship of teaching and learning, and in the effective use of technology for teaching and learning
• Staff and others closely associated with teaching excellence and resource centers, involved in significant institutional improvement of teaching and learning with technology, and interested in creating institutional communities organized around this effort
• Educational/instructional/learning technology departments staff who would like to foster institutional communities of practice organized around using technology to transform teaching and learning
• Others who are interested in participating in the development of the NLII’s Bridging Community, a virtual community of practice with a domain that encompasses the transformation of instructional design and pedagogical practice through enhanced engagement with learning science research. The Bridging VCOP will focus on the use of institutional communities of practice as agents of change to transform this practice in order to promote the most appropriate and effective use of technology to promote learning.

Program

Communities of practice are "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis" (Wenger/McDermott/Snyder, 2002). NLII sponsors virtual communities of practice ("VCOPs") in defined domains so that members can communicate, collaborate and carry out their professional development activities online within their community between face-to-face events.

This online focus session/workshop is the first of a series of activities organized around designing, developing, and supporting the Bridging Community, a community for faculty, staff and others closely associated with faculty development centers, teaching excellence and resource centers and educational/instructional/learning technology departments. The domain of the VCOP encompasses the transformation of instructional design and pedagogical practice through enhanced engagement with learning science research. The Bridging VCOP will focus on the use of institutional communities of practice as agents of change to transform this practice in order to promote the most appropriate and effective use of technology to promote learning. This community will offer a choice of multiple venues, including this focus session.

The online focus session/workshop will provide help to institutional teams as they begin to develop one or more on-going institutional communities of practice. These communities will be organized around helping support faculty and educational/learning technology staff as they tackle significant institutional improvement of teaching and learning with technology. Topics will include how to do an environmental scan/needs analysis of their institution to determine what the opportunities are, review past efforts and shared key learnings on the campus of what works well, and identify the enabling structures for their efforts. The Appreciative Inquiry process will be introduced, and participants will be assisted in scripting the process they will use at their institution, and how to take the information they gather to decide next steps.

The online focus session/workshop will be organized around activity/problem-based learning, and will include follow-up at the end of the workshop with feedback to each institutional team. After the workshop, optional ongoing structured community/synchronous activities to help members of institutional team continue with the next steps in creating their institutional communities of practice.

Work Products & Outcomes

For the individual institutional team participant, the outcomes we would expect to result from the online focus session/workshop are that participants would:

• Find a new way to work with others in teams and establish new collaborative relationships
• Evaluate a virtual community experience and the use of technology to support that experience
• Learn new methodologies for consultation and communication with others

For the institutional team, the work products and outcomes we would expect to result from the online focus session/workshop are that teams would:

• Practice a new methodology to use in conducting an institutional inventory to identify achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, opportunities, benchmarks, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies – and visions of valued and possible futures for the institution that relate to the transformation of teaching and learning using technology.
• Develop locally relevant stories and scenarios for use in institutional visioning about the transformation of teaching and learning with technology.
• Identify preliminary next steps for the development of an institutionally-based community of practice.

For the Bridging Community, the work products and outcomes we would expect to result from the online focus session/workshop are:

• Feedback about the virtual community environment for use in refining the environment, community processes and community support infrastructure.
• Refined definition of audience, purpose, domain, and potentially important community activities for the future.
• Shared stories and scenarios for use in visioning the transformation of teaching and learning with technology.
• Initial community launch and member recruitment.

For the NLII as a sponsor, the Bridging Community is a design experiment in the full utilization of virtual environments to support face-to-face and online collaboration and communication in a professional development context, to advance our knowledge about the use of technology to transform teaching and learning. Desired outcomes would include the development of virtual communities of practice on participants’ campuses, in addition to a good set of data about how to effectively use these online tools, and the corresponding facilitation techniques and community support infrastructure.

Questions We Will Tackle

The following questions are representative of the issues and topics for the online focus session/workshop:

1. How can we understand the individual, group, and institutional needs in order to understand the fundamental purpose for an institutional community of practice from these three perspectives?
2. What are different methodologies that can help us gather the information our teams need to make a good decision about where they could be powerful in creating change?
3. What are some effective practices for conducting an inventory of past efforts/shared key learnings on the campus of what has worked and hasn't worked (what activities are going on/have gone on that are valuable and have been successful/unsuccessful, and what are the enabling structures/barriers)?
4. What are the important existing technical infrastructures (e.g., existing knowledge management systems, student information systems), and how might the proposed community interact with these?
5. How will the community fit within the existing organization culture and sub-cultures?
6. What are the organizational implications of the community, and how will it be coordinated with potentially-related enterprises and programs?
7. What do we need to understand about communities of practice (audience, purpose, domain, activities, community activities and operations) as we explore the role such communities could play in change at our institutions?
8. What do we need to understand about virtual communities of practice that we need to take into account as we explore these issues? How do the online and offline aspects of community interact?