Collaborative Dining Table – New Faculty Development Training
Two months ago I started a new job, and while the transition to a new role while working from home was a bit…untethered due to everyone working remotely, eventually I found my groove and I’ve settled in. One of the first projects I worked on with some people in my new department was an online asynchronous training modules intended to introduce faculty to hybrid teaching and learning. The college is expected to shift a significant number of courses to hybrid delivery post-pandemic and there is a need to train large numbers of faculty in a relatively short amount of time.
At the table: two instructional designers, a faculty developer/ed tech peer mentor, myself – an instructional design technologist, and I suppose also the VPA, deans, and associate deans.
Information from the VPA, deans, and associate deans primarily came via email, though occasionally from synchronous meetings. Collaboration on actually building the training modules was done through a mix of tools like Word online, WebEx, text messaging, and some email.
From my perspective, email is not a great way to brainstorm. Once something has been decided, sure, send it out in an email to all stakeholders. Otherwise, back and forth emails clog up inboxes and it’s easy to miss ideas or the most up to date information.
While Word online can sometimes be a bit clunky, especially around formatting, it’s great for asynchronous collaboration and keeping everyone on the same “page”.
WebEx was used to meet synchronously for any check-ins that we had scheduled throughout the development process.
Since everyone on the team was working remotely and maintaining different schedules, we had a group text going for one-off questions that needed a quick response. Generally I’m not a huge fan of using my personal phone number for work, but I feel comfortable that this team respects boundaries!
MS Teams would be my preferred place to collaborate. There’s file storage, Office 365 document creating and editing, instant messaging, meeting capabilities, etc. all built into the platform.
Picture source: Photo by Cameron Smith on Unsplash
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