Inspired by the work of Fiona Harvey and her iPad coffee club we are launching our own blended learning coffee club here at GCU today. We’re going to make this a monthly-ish informal meeting where we can share practice and have a bit of a chat over a coffee about what colleagues are/aren’t/would like to do in relation to blended learning. We’re also bribing thanking colleagues for taking time to come along by buying them a cup of coffee.
Today we’re going to start the ball rolling so to speak by sharing our experiences of our open event GCU Games On which ran in parallel with the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games this summer.
To support this initiative we’ve set up a team blog and an open (well open but you have to register to access) site using Coursesites where we’re building a collection of case studies and other bits and pieces related to what we are doing. Now before you shout/rant/roll your eyes at me for not just doing all of this in wordpress there are a couple of reasons for using Coursesites.
Firstly, Blackboard is our VLE so this is a good place to encourage our staff to play without interfering with any of their live modules. Secondly, we want to encourage more open-ness here so we have to lead by example. Our primary interest is in our staff and students and we want to encourage them to make the best use of the tech we have. By taking this approach we can have an open sandpit area that is familiar to our staff, and hopefully encourage them to think more about open educational practice. We can also share what we’re doing with others too – so feel free to have a look around. We’re also going to be experimenting with badges and we’ll be illustrating different ways earn and create badges. The badging workflow in Bb works pretty well so we are going to use it and again hopefully allow our colleagues to see the potential of badges in their context.
This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, or anything particularly original but I’m hoping that it will evolve in a supportive and open community.