Collaborating openly when the doors are closed.

I'm revisiting this post made in 2017 during an open course called #BYOD4L which took place in Google + (remember that??) as a result of a suggestion that arose from a twitter musing:

 

lots of reminders of #byod4l in various timelines today - how times change @alexgspiers @neilwithnell @chrissinerantzi @suebecks @debbaff and so many others

— Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) January 16, 2021

Sheila's tweet quickly coalesced into a blog post and brought a group of us back together again to plan a proposal to #OER21. 

Since I wrote the Collaboration post in 2017 many things have happened. 

The Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange initiative lasted 3 years and has had a huge impact as you can see in the reports hosted here.  UNICollaboration.org has been the lead partner on HEI work, delivering recognition through an open badge system based on a collaboratively produced competency framework and providing research into the impact of virtual exchange. This research has been further enhanced by the work of the EVOLVE project  which has shared outputs openly under Creative Commons licences to help HEIs deliver training and support for practitioners and internationalisation officers. So a good deal of concrete support has been available free of charge thanks to the European Commission over the past 3 years or so. 

More recently I retired from my role at Warwick but I am very happy to report that the Clavier virtual exchange continues thanks to the depth and personal engagement of our collaborators. Clavier is now in its 10th year and continues to work as a large scale opportunity for both staff and students to learn together. We celebrated with a badge of course!

The UK withdrew from Erasmus, a decision which shocked many around the world. A decision which has been called out by UK language communities.

The voices of the language community speaking out about the decision to take the UK out of Erasmus Plus:

#erasmust 

So many doors can close at many levels: personal, institutional, political, financial.  How does international collaboration continue when doors close? 

Here is what I have learned over the years. 

• Collaboration can overcome barriers if the purpose of the collaboration is shared and valued by those working together. Clavier has outlived loss of budget, loss of senior management support, even time constraints because we support each other. 
• Working openly helps strengthen collaboration. Choosing tools which are not dependant upon institutional finance and methods which make sharing activity safe but open leads to many unexpected additional opportunities. 
• You can learn lots if you are open to learning from others (including your students). Treading the trickier path described above meant getting a deeper grasp of the technologies we used, sharing critical digital wisdom, listening to all participants and being willing to try new ideas. 
• Celebrate your victories and hug your communities (virtually of course). Virtual Exchange is a hybrid, tougher than the "pure bred" systems which favour either all face to face or all online learning. These strengths have been of great comfort to virtual exchange practitioners during the current pandemic. 

Personally, the Clavier, UNICollaborate and EVOLVE communities have been hugely helpful in advancing my work in virtual exchange but these collaborations go much deeper so I need to acknowledge here the support, inspiration and collaboration gained from participation in these many open online communities of practice:

Open Ed SIG; ALT; Eurocall; #LTHEchat; #BYOD4L; Creative Commons; #femedtech; Open Recognition Alliance; Mahara; Global Education Conference; 

these networks have all been part of my professional and personal development and more importantly perhaps individuals within them have been the key to sustaining my progress whatever happens. Impossible to acknowledge all the individuals but worth saying a huge thank you to all who have worked with me in any way. Some of you have moved on to other careers and opened new doors. 

Collaboration and working collectively touches so many lives and brings so many possibilities that doors are no longer relevant. We've all gone open plan!

Connecting communities and conferences: We have the technology!

Last week I made my way up the M1 to join the #socmedHE conference. Strictly speaking it was the #socmedHE18 conference but as it happened in 2019 I kept to the generic hashtag mostly. I was off to present - or rather to facilitate experience of - Virtual Exchange. The rationale for this was to connect participants at the Nottingham Trent based conference with those attending the Future teacher 3.0 conference in York. Both exciting HE conferences on the same day but about 90 miles apart. Both sharing experiences and expertise in online or digital teaching. My aim was to use what I have learned through designing and running virtual exchange over the past 8 years and share my enthusiasm for the work of the @ft3uk team. I have regularly attended their lunchtime webinars which are always comprehensive, interactive and useful for professional development. 

The design for this session was founded in experiential learning. I designed 3 tasks to take the participants through these stages:

1. Information sharing
2. Comparison and Analysis
3. Co-creation

Timing being short the tasks included a little ice breaking but, unlike the cohorts I usually work with, the participants in these 2 conferences are more homogenous - all working in UK education, mainly Higher Education practitioners. The embedded gdoc in this post shows the tasks in more detail. My slides were a remix from those used by UNICollaboration to present virtual exchange. The co-creation was aggregated using the two conference hashtags through a Tagboard and a wakelet post. (again this was a modified version of co-creation due to the time constraints, our virtual exchangees have to intentionally co-create artefacts but they typically have weeks to negotiate this). 

My session was a face to face session at Nottingham Trent #socmedHE18 transmitted through my Blackboard Collaborate Ultra room to York. The Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange initiative supports practitioners through training to design and engage successfully in virtual exchange and offers opportunities for students to have meaningful international experiences which may compliment or even take the place of physical mobility in cases where it is not possible for whatever reason. 

Recognition of training or participation is provided in the form of open badges. A framework for the creation and issue of open badges for virtual exchange is shared here. The badges are issued through our account with Open Badge Factory which is based in Finland and those who earn them can collect and display them through setting up a profile on Open Badge Passport. Here's mine. 

This taster session - the resources for which remain open - hopefully gave in insight into the excitement and potential for working with those who are at a distance. Having experienced for myself how virtual exchange and connected practice can enrich your understanding of the contexts and challenges faced by others, help develop technical and learning design skills, bring new and exciting opportunities to both students and teachers, I feel that it was a valuable experience and certainly a first for me to present in 2 conferences at the same time!