How to design collaborative learning activities - a workshop for OU staff, 24.10.2013

The OU pilot workshop took place on 24th October 2013.  It was attended by 17 participants, who worked in four groups determined by the faculty they work for (as far as  possible). This meant we had groups for the following faculties.

• Science
  4 participants: 1 from Library services, 3 from LTS
• Business and law
  6 participants: one regional manger with Associate Lecturer experience, one module chair, one academic, 2 LTS people and one academic from HSC who showed up unexpectedly on the day
• Health and Social Care
  4 participants: One academic, 2 LTS people and one from library services.
• Mathematics, Computing and Technology
  3 participants: one academic, one from LTS and a manager of learning and teaching.

In the workshop, participants worked in theses teams to design a collaborative online learning activity. Reports on this and othe other workshops will be available from the project's website in March 2014. Much data was collected at the OU workshop, and this will be analysed and reporrted in detail within  the evalu;tion deliverable due in April 2014.

In the meantime,  it appeared that the workshop was successful in that most  participants appeared to engage in  (and even enjoy) the activity sequence of going from understanding the context, rough conceptual storyboard to detailed design in WebCollage, through demo of implemetation to evaluating  other gorup's designs. More details about the activity sequence and tools used are available in the slides shown below..