A day in the life of a learning technologist

When people ask me what I do, I don’t normally tell them I’m a learning technologist since it sounds like one of those euphemistic titles made up by HR departments to make menial jobs sound grander or to describe a job that doesn’t have any real responsibilities. Instead, I tell people ‘I’m a teacher who also helps teachers and students to use technology in the classroom’ and that actually is a pretty good description of what I do. But I still have a nagging feeling that people don’t really understand what I do, they think I’m a computer technician who fixes laptops or - possibly worse - they think I don’t do very much at all. So, in the spirit of helping people to grasp what a learning technologist actually does, here’s a description of all the things I did in one day, Tuesday April 23rd.


8.55: get into work at the English Language Teaching Centre (ELTC) and sit down at my desk. Classes start at 9.15 and there’s often teachers needing help with finding bits of equipment or need help using a particular device. This is really our computer technician’s job, but he’s stretched very thin and is often somewhere else fixing something. A teacher comes in needing video cameras for some recording he’s going to do in class, I help him find them and quickly go over how to use them.

9.05: a teacher in my office wants to watch a video on BBC iplayer on her computer but there are issues with Adobe Flash and it needs to be updated so I log in as admin and update it for her.

9.10: I finally sit down at my desk and turn on my computer. I’m currently the main tutor on an online teacher training course (CELTA) we’re running so I make sure I spend the first ten to fifteen minutes in the morning checking on the course activity and forum posts. There are a couple of forum posts to respond to so I spend ten minutes or so writing those and then reply to a few emails.

9.30: I meet with a teacher to induct him in how to be a tutor for our online writing advisory service. The ELTC offers an online writing advisory service for distance learning students (see this post for more info) and as the service grows, I need to train more teachers in how to use the Google Drive/Docs system we have in place to respond to students’ essays. We sit down in our staffroom with a couple of Chromebooks and go through it together.

10.10: sit back down to deal with a couple more emails but interrupted by a teacher who is in the computer room with her class. One of her students can’t save a document on to his account because he’s reached his storage limit. I go along to see if I can help, realise he’s got loads of audio files taking up space and phone up CICS to get his storage increased. Problem solved.

10.30: earlier in the morning I’d read about a couple of online tools that integrate with Google Drive called Learnly and Video Notes, the first is for providing audio feedback on Google Docs, the second for making notes on You Tube videos. I’m so impressed by Video Notes I decide to create a quick screencast explaining how to use it and embed it in our teacher resource site. Then I write an email letting teachers know where to find it and also mention a few other tech-related news items. 

Our teacher resource site and the screencast embedded

12:00: Later in the afternoon I have an online writing advisory video tutorial with a distance learning student based in Ghana. I need to take a look at the student’s essay before the tutorial so I spend an hour checking through his essay on Google Docs and make some comments.

13.15: a teacher has recorded some videos of students speaking in his class, but now doesn’t know what to do so that the students can see them. I sit with him at his desk and show him how to upload them to his university You Tube account and make the videos unlisted so that only the students can see them.

13.30: lunchtime....

14.15: Time for my online writing advisory appointment, I find an empty classroom, connect with him through Google+ Hangouts and we have a really productive 30-minute chat about his essay. 

The online writing advisory appointment using Google Docs and Hangouts

14.50: a teacher comes to me looking for help with some dictaphones she’s using in class with her students. They’ve recorded themselves speaking but when they play them back, they’re at double speed. We’ve had this problem before so I go down and quickly help adjust the settings so they play back normally.

15.00: break....

15.15: a teacher in our office needs help creating a contact group in Gmail so he can send emails out to the whole class. We sit down at his desk and go through how to do it.

15.30: In the evening two trainees on our CELTA teacher training course will be coming in to teach students and the usual trainer who observes them is absent, so I’m stepping in for today. I need to take a look at their lesson plans and write some comments on them so I spend the next forty-five minutes doing that and also setting up the observation template forms I use when watching them.

16.45: normally at this time I’m getting ready to go home, but today I’m staying later so I make my way down to the classroom to observe the trainees teach. The lesson lasts for 80 minutes (each trainee teaching forty minutes) and when it’s over we spend 30 minutes discussing and reflecting on the lesson.

19.00: finally, time to go home...a longer day than normal and I’m exhausted...

Apart from its unusual length, this is a fairly typical day for me, a mix of online teaching, dealing with technical issues as they crop up, preparing guides and materials for teachers and students and face to face teaching. Now, I’ve got no idea if this is at all representative of what other learning technologists do, I reckon some things here might ring a bell with some of you but I’m sure you have many unique tasks that are relevant only to your department or working situation. In fact I’d be fascinated to know a little bit about your working days and whether you’re involved more on the technical side or the academic side or an even mixture of both. And at least now if someone looks sceptical about your job title, you can point them in the direction of this post and say ‘see, see, it is a real job!’.

The ScHARR MOOC Diaries part VII - Jack and the Giant Course - Getting a MOOC to Market

'The Only Way is Up' - © Luke Miller - Image used under a Creative Commons By Attribution  Licence 

When creating a MOOC there are several factors you have to consider, all of them eat up precious time. From the previous posts on whether we can actually do this to deciding on a platform, and pulling a team of experts together is no easy thing, and we’ve not even got on to the other M word just yet - marketing.

Marketing in the traditional sense is quite simple, you identify a target group who you think might be interested in your product and push it that way. MOOCs are quite different from that, first of all we are running three health-related courses, which naturally is of interest to a wide range of people and organisations, from the NHS to BUPA, from governing bodies to charities, from health practitioners to members of the general public, and ultimately this can be applied on a global scale. So the courses are truly global in their appeal as we are all interested in our health and that of others in some way.

The flip side is that this potentially means a lot of interested parties and individuals that you want to get the message to and as I said earlier, running a MOOC is labour intensive regardless of marketing. 

By Colin (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Colin

So with that in mind we are treating the marketing of our MOOCs like an onion, that there are many layers we need to peel back:

Firstly starting closest to home we already have a cohort of current health-research students on site, most of whom are from Africa and Asia. As we saw in Dan Smith’s post on managing participant enrolment we have managed to entice students from that part of the globe to our MOOCs. Certainly the anecdotal evidence from a lot of MOOCs is that the majority are being undertaken by people who either have a higher education background, whether as students or staff. Certainly every MOOC seems to attract students who are academic staff who are either interested in the course content or more often how the MOOC is run. The real untapped potential of MOOCs is that they begin to attract the greater numbers of students who have not attended a higher education establishment before in addition to those from parts of the world where this is much harder to attain specialist health education.

We also want our staff to enrol on the courses, whether just for the in-house pilot we plan to run ahead of the first course or as students when they are formally released. The main reasons being that they get to not only see and feel what it’s like to be in a MOOC, but to be a distance learner as some may go on to deliver learning via our various e-learning channels.

The next layers are the Faculty of Medicine of which we are part of, with over 1000 staff and several 1000 students we want them to take part in the first MOOC at the University of Sheffield. Much of this marketing will and has taken place via internal electronic mailing lists, personal contacts, our ScHARR MOOC Diary Blog and the University Learning Technology Blog. Then there is the whole University, again the courses will be publicised as previously mentioned but will also include features on our University homepage, thus taking us beyond the University firewall, which has huge potential. On campus we can employ traditional marketing methods including posters, newsletters and business cards. Whilst any colleagues travelling to conferences and events have been encouraged to take our MOOC materials with them.

It’s beyond this firewall where much of our marketing will take place and for this to happen more effectively we need champions and support beyond our MOOC team. This comes from internal experts who work in our marketing and media teams to help channel the news of our MOOCs to established contacts with national and international organisations. We are based in Sheffield, at a University that has strong ties with the local community, a community that has inequalities in the quality of health of its population. So it’s fitting that our courses, one of which is on the said topic reaches out to those with an interest in it. We plan to promote the courses to local organisations, the two large teaching hospitals, charities and individuals who will benefit from this open sharing of health education. We have good connections with the local media, from BBC Radio Sheffield to the Sheffield newspapers, who really can reach out to the local population.

It’s at this point that a need for translation become much more important, for those of us lucky enough to have worked at an academic institution and gotten our heads around MOOCs it is all too simple to forget that to others things can get lost in translation - how many people outside of a university knows what a MOOC is? As someone who spent a lot of time reporting on council and court proceedings as a journalism student some many years ago I learned how important it was to turn council-speak and legalese into something that the person on the street could understand. Talking about MOOCs is OK, but sometimes we have to understand that not everyone knows what it is, and why it may be different from another online course that is free. By writing a simple one page ‘press release’ or offering FAQs and glossary of terms we remove much of the barriers that sometimes intimidates those who have never set foot on an academic campus.

The courses are of massive potential for the NHS, an organisation where staff often struggle to find time or funds for carrying on professional development. Reaching out to the NHS is not always that easy due to the scale of the organisation and barriers set around it, so champions are needed. As for champions they rarely come more enthusiastic or connected than health librarians with a huge network of NHS libraries to collaborate with. Libraries are often the central hub of health organisations, so are an ideal place to help spread the courses organically. The altruistic nature of MOOCs has been a driving force for us at ScHARR and by including the NHS as best as we can it feels we are giving something back to this important workforce. As the marketing starts to extend nationally and globally it becomes increasingly important that the duplication of effort is paid attention to. Anyone involved in running a MOOC can transmit the courses via their personal networks, and over time the need for a single uninformed message explaining in simple terms what the courses and MOOCs in general are about. The plan to explore is by collaborating with journalists, academics and established bloggers based in the health education sector by sending press packs. These packs will include short briefs on each course, something about MOOCs, and ScHARR, poster materials and business cards.

Video is also an important part of our marketing strategy and we have already recorded our first one wit Dr Angie Clonan introducing our MOOCs.

According to technology giant Cisco Systems, video is forecast to be the dominant format for mobile and computers and with YouTube uploading 72 hours of content for every hour we have understood at ScHARR for some time that video is increasingly an effective way to communicate, teach and learn.

Discussion and mailing lists may have been around for decades but still remain an important communication tool for discussing everything from health to communication. The opportunities for marketing the courses is extensive. These will include JISC mail lists, Environment Job, Charity Job email lists to name but a few.

Alongside video, such as YouTube and Vimeo, other social media channels are being explored. This obviously means targeting Facebook and their groups, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.Edu, Mendeley Groups, alongside other the micro-blogging giant Twitter. Already we have seen spikes in our enrollment numbers potentially attributed to the little bird and Tweets we’d posted about our MOOCs. We have already employed the #scharrmoocs hashtag via our @ScHARRsheffield and @openScHARR accounts and posted on our ScHARR Facebook pages. At the University we have been using Google Apps for Education for nearly two years now and many of the #scharrmoocs team are active on Google+ as a result sharing updates on the courses there.

The ScHARR MOOCs for this summer/autumn are all hosted on the Blackboard platform Coursesites as discussed in our second post. This brings our courses to the huge number of students already undertaking courses there. Our courses are part of the catalogue of courses hosted by other institutions that will hopefully bring additional students to our course, with the benefit of many already using the Coursesites platform previously to undertake a MOOC.

There are countless avenues for anyone starting up a MOOC and we’ve only covered a few here. It very much depends on your target audience, but the MOO in MOOC is a clue as to how you promote your course. They are potentially massive, and certainly on-line and open, so the sky is literally the limit as to how far you pitch them. The only real limit is a big one and that is resources, getting the message out there effectively is no small thing. Following up posts and mail outs and checking for responses in threads and groups could potentially take up more resources. To go back to the analogy of the title, when you do start planting the seeds you are unsure of what will grow and how big it will get. With an effective marketing plan you not only have a better chance of making your MOOC massive but you also build the networks for future courses and for established communication channels with your students that begin before and hopefully do not end ‘ever-after’ the course has finished.

The ScHARRMOOC Diaries part VI - Managing participant enrolment

The ScHARRMOOC Diaries part VI - Managing participant enrolment

Since we allowed participants to start registering on our ScHARR MOOCs on the 8th Feb 2013 we have had a steady stream of sign-ups (with occasional ‘surges’). At the time of writing this latest ScHARR MOOC Diary entry we currently have over 480 registered ‘MOOCsters’.

But how exactly are we managing this process? How are we ensuring that this doesn't incur an unmanageable administrative load?

Well, let’s start by looking at the process we have in place for accepting registrations.

The sign-up process 

The process we were going to use had to be nailed down before we made anything available - changing once students started signing up would have been a disaster. We had 3 options for the entry to our MOOCs:

1. completely open, no signup - like a public-facing website that has scheduled activities. This would have made analysing the users of the course further down the line problematic not to mention any moderating.
2. self enrolment, semi-open - the course available to view but with everything but the homepage hidden. They can only see as much of the course as we want them to see at the moment, so we can still turn on some of the tools and make them available before the start and we have a natural place in the homepage to post or link to additional information.
3. it could be self enrolled with the everything hidden - this is what most MOOCs I have seen so far have done, with just a separate webpage outlining the course. Keeping as much information as possible inside the course made most sense.

We went for option 2. The process is outlined in the slide below...





As it mentions students can ask questions before or upon signing up - we have an account (scharrmoocs@sheffield.ac.uk) set up for handling enquiries and set aside time to check incoming mails generated by the sign up process for questions about the courses. This initially was handled by Luke but once the volume increased (we’ve had over 100 in a day) some admin help from Jess and Jon (thanks!) was arranged. We have created a MOOC FAQs page, based on the kinds of enquiries we are receiving from would-be participants, to help minimise the admin load.

Who is signing up?

So, whilst coursesites enables us to process our participants in a fairly automated way, we do still have some manual admin tasks that require regular attention.  For starters, we wanted to keep an up-to-date record of who was signing up to which MOOC and when. We are gathering this information by capturing registration request numbers in a google spreadsheet which is updated (manually) daily.

We also wanted to record some basic demographic information about who was actually signing up. More specifically, for each signup, we were interested in the following information:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• How they heard about us

This information is gathered using a google form and for each MOOC we can start to get a picture of where (globally) our participants are coming from

We were also keen to monitor the amount of resource which was being invested internally in terms of staff hours (broken into different roles such as ‘academic’, ‘admin’ and ‘learning technologists’). This would ultimately help inform our ScHARR MOOC evaluations and help with decisions about the viability of running future MOOCS. 

Finally we’ve also embedded google analytics into several pages that lead into the MOOCs - more about those in another post once we have more information from them.

For more information or to sign up and see more go to our ScHARR MOOCs registration page.

Luke and Dan