I have recently started a new digital experience: doing a course by remote learning. In many respects this is great, for example, removing the need for four hours of tiring and stressful driving. In other respects I am unsure. The Technical and Digital Leadership (TDL) module was based around a three-hour weekly teaching session delivered via Webex. A significant part of these sessions were allocated to small group work, operated as Webex 'breakout' sessions.
Webex 'breakout' sessions provide the ability to mark up virtual whiteboards for each group. These can be shared back to the plenary session and discussed. In this, it is very similar to the ubiquitous flipchart and marker pen feedback of pre-digital groupwork.
So this style of learning is a digital innovation which I am experiencing for the first time on a course about digital innovation.
My observation is that there a number of factors which tend to make these digital breakout sessions unproductive
Choice of exemplar organisations
In the first class, when small groups of students were thrown together into breakout groups for the first time, people tended to relay experience back from the organisations that they worked for. This was valuable
Very quickly thereafter, whenever groups were asked to relate the questions to an organisation, the emerging choices invariably revolved around a small number of high profile organisations, Amazon/AWS. Apple, AirBnB, Tesla, etc. These tended to be the ones heralded in the course material as examples of highly successful disruptive innovation. The organisations were often talked about in terms of charismatic leaders, e.g. Elon Musk, who although fascinating are far from easy to emulate.
So rather than relay valuable insights from our own experience, the groups engaged in speculation about a small number of organisations that none of us had any direct experience of. We imagined what the culture of these organisation was like; we imagined what the charismatic leaders were like to work for. The result was generally shallow guesswork. We set up a feedback loop which further narrowed our collective attention onto this same small set in the following exercises. It is as if subconsciously we were trying to echo back what we were expected to think, rather than what we actually thought.
There was no challenge. We did not challenge each other, perhaps out of politeness; the tutor did not challenge us, perhaps in the spirit of valuing all contributions. But the contributions were not equally valid and they were not grounded in our experience. Nothing refocused us. It became uncritical.
Too many strands, too little time
Very frequently, groups could not get to end of all the strands of the breakout session tasks. So material intended to be covered in the latter part of tasks was frequently not covered at all. Rather than give every group every element, we could have given each group a different element.
Too much similarity
The tasks appeared to overlap in content and the groupwork responses certainly did
Too little preparation
The tasks set in the groupwork assumed that all the week's set material had been studied in advance. Very often students had barely looked at most if it. This meant that, for me at least, the sessions were often working one step behind rather than one step in front
Time used 'therapeutically 'instead of on the task set
On several occasions, students used the time in the breakout session to exchange feelings about aspects of the course, perhaps because there was no alternative forum for this. While this served a purpose it did not serve the primary purpose
Usual groupwork features
Tended to be the same people acting as group leaders. Their feedback was often disconnected from what he group actually talked about. Some individuals were passive and let everybody else do the talking
No comments:
Post a Comment