Workshop No. 1
Quite relieved to have my first workshop delivered and out of the way. How did it go? Well, I’m not really sure!
The workshop content was the concepts behind blended learning, something I’ve never taught before. My main aim was to get across the fact that blended and elearning was far more than just putting content (course manuals) up on a website. 10 people attended, mainly lecturers from the computer science dept and they all seemed to take an active part in the activities I had planned, all were happy to give their thoughts when I asked questions and to share the results from their group activities.
The final activity didn’t go quite as I’d expected, which may be more to do with my explanation of the activity than anything else. What I wanted people to do was design an online learning activity for their students, which would be very specific for one of their courses. However the results were somewhat vaguer than I’d expected, and were more along the lines of ‘I’d use some online exercises, quizzes and forums’. So looking in the right direction, but not quite what I’d meant.
The main piece of feedback I’ve had is that it wasn’t practical enough, although to me the point of the workshop was just to get the concepts across and I was wary of repeating the Moodle training Wondwossen and Irene previously gave some of th attendees. Maybe I need to be more careful about people’s expectations next time and perhaps arrange for a follow up practical workshop. Perhaps my final activity would have worked better if it’d been followed up with a practical session using Moodle to create the learning activity.
In all I was pleased that (a) people had turned up at all and (b) they took part in the activities – plus it was a small enough group (of people I know anyway from the dept) for me to ‘test’ the workshop on, I’ve had some useful feedback, so I’ll be much happier next time it’s run with a bigger group.
