Hosting Collaboration by Design
Summary
Last week I hosted the Digital Skills, Design and Training (DSDT) section meeting. The theme of the meeting was: collaboration. I draw on a combination of pedagogies to create an interactive experience for my colleagues including: play-based learning, flipped classrooms, individual activities, collaborative activities and reflection. The feedback from my team was overwhelmingly positive, and I wanted to share the process I went through to put this meeting together.
I’m a big fan of team and section meetings, town halls, all-staffs – the approaches taken by different organisations, and business units tend to vary, but they generally have the same purpose: to disseminate information to a group, and seek feedback. As a staff member I have always felt they are a good way to better understand the overarching goals of the organisation, and as a team manager I feel they are important for building team culture.
Digital Skills, Design and Training is the newest section in LTW, and over the last few months I have been considering how we can better collaborate to improve our services, instead of continuing to work in the silos we once belonged to. I’m constantly fascinated by the variety of services offered in our directorate, let alone more widely at the University of Edinburgh. The scale of our organisation often means we have limited knowlege of the wonderful work of our colleagues across the hall. This was my motivation for “Collaboration by Design”.
The title itself, “Collaboration by Design” was intentional. The key theme: Collaboration, and By Design: not only an inside joke in the Design Team to link our team services (Graphic Design, CMALT, Edinburgh Award, LinkedIn Learning, Digital Skills Framework, Digital Safety), but also a reminder that collaboration is not just something that happens. It is a conscious choice (or not) for a group of individuals working together; something we do by design.
As an educator I am always looking for the best pedagogical approaches for each specific learning opportunity I facilitate. Over recent years I have become a big fan of play-based learning, or playful learning. This pedagogical strategy is the foundation of early education frameworks but seems to slowly disappear from classrooms as we grow up. While I also advocate for explicit teaching strategies for the development of deep knowlege, engagement with and application of concepts is important for retention. This is where play-based learning comes into play.
Equipped with some ideas about collaboration, a love of section-meetings, and the inspired by play-based learning, I set about planning the DSDT section meeting.
The Spark
While poking about the internet I came across Durham University’s The Great Escape. This is a digital escape room, created using a OneNote notebook with password protected sections. I was immediately hooked! I love an escape room. The team at Durham have put together some fantastic resources: example escape room puzzles and a really thorough guide explaining how to create your own digital escape rooms. I really wish I had read that second resource before jumping down the creative rabbit warren of writing my own virtual escape room…
The Great Escape – Escape Rooms for Learning and Teaching | Durham Centre for Academic Development
The Writing Process
I naively thought the writing process would be easy. In the era of Generative AI I thought I would have it done and dusted in an afternoon (or two). I used the Edinburgh access to Language Model (ELM) with the following prompt:
I want to run a team building workshop. It needs to be able to run online. Write me a virtual escape room that can be completed in small groups
ELM | The University of Edinburgh (login required)
Not a particularly detailed prompt, but it did generate a fair amount of contextual content and resource lists. I now had an idea to run with, and set about writing the puzzles. Unfortunately ELM was less good at writing the puzzles and producing the resources (to be honest, my prompts probably needed some work too).
Fast forward a few weeks…
I was struggling to write the puzzles. The context I had was intriguing (we were going to have to find the criminal mastermind who had hacked into our servers), but it relied on a lot of cipher tasks which were challenging to write and embed within the context of learning about section section. I had lost sight of what my goal for the section meeting was.
As an educator I have often let my excitement for a new pedagogical approach overshadow my learning objective. Like any child with a new toy, it is easy to focus on the form, and not the function of strategies in our pedagogical toolkit. Based on my past experience, when this happens you end up with an activity that is confusing to explain and stressful to facilitate.
The “why”
Two weeks out from the section meeting I had made little progress. I asked myself, what do I want my team to take away from this meeting?
That at least was an easy question to answer:
I want my colleagues to leave the section meeting with a better understanding of all of the services offered across our section.
So, I had my learning objective. This return to the “why”, caused me to change the context of my escape room. We no longer had to compete to “find the mole” in our team. We had to infiltrate and assimilate into our section. The contextual change was pivotal in meeting my deadline and finishing all of the resources on time. I did away with a lot of the original ideas, and writing I had from ELM, and went back to the three puzzles Durham University included in their example escape room. I used the same puzzle structure, but re-wrote the clues to match our context. Once I was in “the zone”, puzzle writing and creating connections in the storyline was a lot easier. Suddenly, most of the work was done within an afternoon.
Final steps
Two-days before I was due to host the section meeting, I user-tested my escape room with a few colleagues from another section. It was extremely helpful to observe how they approached each puzzle. In the moment I rewrote some of the clues, or added additional resources to certain rooms to make the puzzles a bit clearer.
If I had stuck to my original (read that as overly confident, and completely naive) schedule, the user testing would have left me two weeks to make adjustments. In the end, two(ish) days was just enough to make the whole activity reasonably smooth.
On the day
The section meeting was hybrid, run using MS Teams. About two-thirds of participants were in the room, and the reminder joined online. Participants in the room broke into two smaller groups, and I used breakout rooms (a function built into MS Teams) to allow the online participants to collaborate as a group. While the teams in the room had the advantage of overhearing each other (I did consider booking a physical breakout room), in a second iteration I would still have the teams in one large space. Afterall, the theme of the day was collaboration.
After the activity, I asked my colleagues to submit their thoughts on collaboration anonymously through WooClap. Earlier in the session we had used Kahoot! as a short individual activity which gave them something to compare the collaborative activity to. Reflection is key when it comes to play-based learning. You need to make sure participants connect the activity to the learning objective in a conscious and considered way to maximise understanding. These submissions were used to create a team blog post on the Digital Skills, Design and Training Blog. Our previous section meeting had been on blogging and culminated in the launch of our section blog. Including a small section relating to blogging was an intentional choice to embed previous section meeting content, showing the continuing relevance of what we learn when we come together.
Collaboration by Design | Digital Skills, Design and Training
Agenda
The section meeting used the following agenda, which was provided to the participants several days prior to the event:
- Opening and Welcome – (10 mins)
- Introduction to Collaboration* – (5 mins)
- Working Alone – Individual Activity using Kahoot! – (10 mins)
- Working Together – Collaborative Activity: Digital Escape Room using OneNote(40 mins)
- Reflection on the difference between working individually and collaboratively (10 mins)
- Show & Tell** – Lightning Talks from each team/segment within the section (15 mins)
- Pack Up & Wrap** up – Close (5 mins)
*Reading materials were provided several days prior to the section meeting, giving participants an option to familiarise themselves with the theoretical concepts of collaboration and teamwork prior to the section meeting.
Flipped Classrooms | The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning
**I intentionally picked cheesy section titles like “Show & Tell” and “Pack Up & Wrap Up” to embed the playful tone of the section meeting.
Resources
- MS PowerPoint – present on Teams using PowerPoint Live (allows access to more accessibility features for participants and all the links you display can be clicked by participants, allowing them access to the correct resources when required)
- Kahoot! – a free (and subscription) platform to create interactive activities for hybrid and in-person meetings (I used this because I was familiar with it from previous teaching jobs. They also have a great library of pre-made question sets. This results in very little effort for very large reward when it comes to creating interactive activities)
- MS OneNote – Durham University used OneNote for their digital escape room, and I didn’t consider any other tool
- WooClap – this is an interactive meeting tool supported by the University of Edinburgh. (I had intended to only use this as it is University endorsed, but my familiarity with Kahoot! allowed me to meet my required deadline. Also, it’s library of publicly available content is significantly smaller than Kahoot!).
Reading Materials
These materials helped me form my own understanding of collaboration, and were provided to the section along with the agenda several-days prior to the meeting. While I did not insist on attendees needing to engage with the material before the session, this approach was an intentional use of flipped-classroom methodologies.
What I learned
- Focus on the learning objective, not the activity
- Play-based activities don’t need to be overly complicated
- Conduct User Testing (Escape rooms in particular require a certain type of logic, and we all process information in different ways)
- Make sure you are a co-organiser for the MS Teams Meeting (otherwise you cannot set up the breakout rooms)
- As a facilitator you learn a lot by observing how participants navigate the learning experiences you create
