In my experience, the most important attributes of a leader working in digital learning environments reflect the Seven Pillars listed in Sheninger’s Pillars of Digital Leadership (2019) primarily because of the emphasis put on communication. My workspaces have spanned private for-profit, public non-profit, and education spaces from kindergarten to post-secondary, each space having a different set of attitudes, expectations, and willingness to adopt and use technology for learning. In many cases those attitudes, etc., are based on personal biases and experiences or popular culture, not on factual study or evidence. Sheninger’s Pillars, with the inclusion of communication, public relations, branding and student engagement and learning, most comprehensively address the varying attitudes of potential users with strategies to assist stakeholders in understanding why implementation is necessary, what it can look like, and how it can positively affect users. When communication is done capably through implementation of these pillars, users are better able to connect the institutional adoption and development of digital learning spaces with their own growth and greater competency in their work or learning.
While there are two spaces in which leadership in digital learning environments is relevant for me personally, I’ve chosen to concentrate on one for the purposes of this blog post. I work for a large music festival in the summer, and last year implemented an online digital learning platform (Moodle).
The music festival was looking for a way to pre-train their 2000+ employees and volunteers before they arrive on site for the show. Everyone must undergo a mandatory safety orientation, done in previous years as workers arrive. Historically, this meant delivering the information to large groups in batches (the bulk of those 2000 people arrive over two days) and having the workers sign off on their participation. Workers participating in the safety orientation is non-negotiable as it part of the festival’s WorkSafe BC compliance. Human Resources (HR) staff was extremely stretched during the days that workers arrived, wanting to orient all employees quickly, and with less strain on HR.
As senior management, our solution was to create a Moodle shell and short Moodle course (the safety orientation) and short quiz. The link to the course was sent out with the employee or volunteer acceptance letter, with an explanation that their work at the festival was conditional on their completing and passing the online safety orientation quiz. Workers went to a link that showed a short (five minute) video, with a randomly generated five question quiz. Competency was set at mastery (all five questions answered correctly), and once completed, HR was notified that the person had completed their orientation and could be accepted to work on site.
Our initial expectation for uptake in the first year was that 30 – 40% of workers would complete the orientation ahead of time, with many returning workers expecting to do the orientation on site as they had in previous years (we had the old version of the orientation available as a back up). We were delighted to find that 89% of workers did their orientation online ahead of time through the Moodle (numbers generated by HR as part of report-out after the festival).
The festival has a very active social media presence. While the bulk of people were accessing the Moodle course, social media threads included explanations and screenshots of how to create an account and log in for the course. Dialogue was lively and engaged between potential workers and the moderators of the social media platforms, and soon we saw that potential workers were troubleshooting for each other and offering help to get each other get into Moodle.
Sheninger’s (2019) pillar of communication explains some of why our initial roll-out was a success. The HR team was actively engaged in two-way communication through a variety of different digital channels, (email, online conferencing and social media) to help workers understand the benefits (shorter processing at arrival on site) completing the orientation online had, and working with them to ensure that the experience was as barrier-free as it could be. The pillars of public relations and branding help to explain success through our ability to control the narrative somewhat (through our social media presence), avoiding negative rhetoric through good customer service, in line with our overarching customer service philosophy and inclusive community philosophical underpinnings.
The initial roll-out of the safety orientation was successful enough that other departments of our festival (Harm Reduction, Medical, and Equipment Usage) have been developing their own courses to deliver to their workers before coming to site. I’ve been working with them to ensure that the pillar of student engagement and learning is explored and implemented effectively throughout the development phase with different methods of delivering information and assessing learning.
As an organization, we will take what we learned about effective communication and build on it for this year to push the reach of this program further in hopes that our workers come to experience a more streamlined arrival to site, and better prepared to do their work.
References:
Sheninger, E. (2019, December 19). Pillars of Digital Leadership. International Center for Leadership in Education. https://leadered.com/pillars-of-digital-leadership/
I enjoyed reading your post Lisa. I love that you included your diverse workspaces and touched on the idea that biases and experiences directly affect the work environment, both for leaders and their teams. I agree that working with Sheninger’s pillars, primarily communication can help to solve many of the issues that come with a multitude of backgrounds coming together.
I’m impressed with your success rate with your introduction of online training for volunteers! It also impresses me how much work your HR team was willing to put in to make the new initiative a success and I think that speaks to the leadership as well as the buy-in of the team.
I am looking forward to hearing about your success with the next phase
Kathy
Hi Kathy,
Thanks for taking the time to read. It was a bit of a wild ride, at times!
Some of the strength of this staff comes from the core team being small, knowing each other very well, and willing to pivot to whatever is going to be the most efficacious for the Festival. There is very little turf- or ego-based posturing. As a group, there is always the willingness to explore things that will make the show itself work more smoothly. The Festival began as a backyard party and has grown exponentially to an annual attendance of 16,000, so there’s had to have been a willingness to scale. I’m grateful to work with this team. They very much follow what looks like a reflective leadership practice – I sent the Castelli (2015) article to my COO as I thought he’d agree that it encapsulates a lot of what the Festival staff is doing right.
Castelli, P. A. (2015). Reflective leadership review: A framework for improving organisational performance. The Journal of Management Development; Bradford, 35(2), 217–236. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.royalroads.ca/10.1108/JMD-08-2015-0112
Hi Lisa,
What an interesting post that encapsulates Sheninger’s “Pillars of Digital Leadership”(2019) and “reflective leadership” in-action so well! I really appreciated your statement: “When communication is done capably through implementation of these pillars, users are better able to connect the institutional adoption and development of digital learning spaces with their own growth and greater competency in their work or learning.” I thought it was amazing that you had 89% of workers and volunteers do their safety training online, versus in-person, as they had done previously. I think that this speaks to many people’s willingness and interest to do some tasks online, versus in person or face-to-face (F2F).
I have done a lot of thinking about the differences between F2F learning, online learning, and blended learning experiences. As an introvert, I often prefer online learning. Yet as a student AND teacher, I often seek out and highly value F2F learning experiences, because I feel that the human-interaction element of learning is invaluable, and even powerful sometimes. HOWEVER, I see the scenario where your team created an online course for training prior to the festival, as better — even more effective and efficient — than the previous F2F training with about 2,000 people largely arriving for this training over the span of two days. I can see how it would be difficult to deliver the training logistically, and I can see how the workers might actually learn better in the focused online course, prior to arriving on-site with a multitude of distractions.
It sounds like you have a great team that has grown this music festival into something special… and big! A testament to the holistic and flexible nature of reflective leadership. Very cool.
I wonder if workers who take the online training component this year will be closer to 100%? Hoping that the world gets a grip on COVID-19 so that events this summer can happen… face-to-face!
Leigh