Birds of a Feather: Deepening staff engagement with e-learning

This was a share your stories session, which I thought I might be able to get some innovative staff development stragies out of. Unfortunately it was disappointing for several reasons. First, there were 100 people in the room, which is not good for sharing. Second, the room was set up like a lecture hall, meaning you could barely discuss anything.

Finally, there just weren't many new ideas being put out there. The way many people got people to come to staff development events was "We raffle off an iPod, camera, or give them cash". Not sure bribery is a good long term incentive to continue with e-learning. The other take on bribery was that your department gets a laptop to use if you come to our 8 introductory training sessions (which seemed like a lot to start out with at once).

The other one was Leeds Met saying it was mandatory that they engage in a minimum way with many different aspects of e-learning. While I don't totally disagree that is should be mandatory, you do lose a lot of good will in the process, and you just know that mandatory means nothing to some academics.

Having academics involved in a committee steering or driving e-learning was considered groundbreaking news at the end of the session, and the idea of running show n' shares seemed to have never occurred to many people. It was kind of a scary session where I was afraid to speak less I either insulted all the other people or just got mobbed. Not that there was time for me to speak with the 20 people waiting in line behind the microphone though. The session didn't really touch on the core issues of induction for new staff or actually encouraging staff who are using it in limited ways to deepen their engagement. It still focused mostly on those who were not engaging.