Author: Sandra

Developing a Sustainability Plan

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One of the final design decisions I made for my DLRCP was to include a sustainability plan as an appendix. My literature review and research into OER identified three areas of importance that were applicable to my project: discoverability, reusability, and sustainability. Throughout my research paper, I explored each of these three areas in depth. In my recommendations, my wireframe mockups worked well to suggest ways to address both discoverability and reusability. However, sustainability was more difficult to address though a mockup. Recommendations for sustainability would require organizational decision making and long-term planning (Tlili et al., 2020). During my research I came across Desrochers (2019) “OER field guide for sustainability planning” and this gave me the idea to include a sustainability plan.

Creating a sustainability plan as an appendix gave me more room to include ideas and details without interrupting the flow of the research paper. Initially, I had included a bullet-point list of questions in my sustainability recommendations. However, as I continued to read and learn about sustainability, the list of questions grew. Sustainability is more than just financial and legal considerations (Tlili et al., 2020). As Stacey and Wiley (2020) point out, there are social considerations to address, and many more questions to ask:

Who creates all these OER? What is their motivation? Who manages the resulting OER? How are they curated? How will these OER be updated and improved, and by whom? What would motivate a person or organization to make a long-term commitment to updating and improving OER? (para. 5).

I followed the framework in Desrochers (2019) field guide to create a set of questions which were organized into three domains: infrastructure, resources, and culture. These questions, along with links to additional resources and case studies, made up the sustainability plan I included in my research paper. I wonder what the impact of including this component in my paper will be. Ideally, as my sponsor organization takes the next step in this project, we will meet and work together to begin answering these questions, as well as adding new questions that arise along the way.

 

References

Desrochers, D. M. (2019). OER field guide for sustainability planning. Retrieved from https://oer.suny.edu/oer-sustainability/

Stacey, P. & Wiley, D. (2020, November 16–20). Building a Social Framework for Sustaining Open Educational Resources [Conference presentation]. OE Global 2020.

Tlili, A., Nascimbeni, F., Burgos, D., Zhang, X., Huang, R., & Chang, T. W. (2020). The evolution of sustainability models for Open Educational Resources: Insights from the literature and experts. Interactive Learning Environments. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1839507

Creating Wireframe Mockups

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As a Digital Learning Research Consulting Project (DLRCP), deciding how to represent the consulting part of my research presented an interesting challenge. A wanted my research to be more than just theoretical and include a tangible component that I created as part of the project. Given the goal to eventually design an OER repository, this tangible component would ideally be a prototype for the final repository. Action research involving software development commonly begins with a full specification prototype or working software model (Baskerville & Wood-Harper, 1998). However, within the limited scope and timeframe for my project, it wasn’t feasible to build a working software model for the repository itself. Instead, I chose to create a set of wireframe mockups for the user interface of the proposed repository.

Figure 1Figure 1. Wireframe of the repository front page.

Wireframe mockups represented a way to provide visual recommendations based on my research. Without creating a working software prototype, I was still able to suggest the layout and functionality of the proposed repository based on the findings from my interviews and content analysis. For example, in my research I found that supporting a Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998) should be an initial primary focus for the repository. By designing mockups, I was able to suggest interface elements in the wireframes that supported these findings, such as community discussion forums and recent activity feeds (see Figure 1). I chose to include the wireframes inline with my recommendations, rather than in an appendix, because they were much more relevant when paired with the text that explained them. In designing the wireframes, I found it challenging to decide just how many wireframes to create or how detailed they should be. In the end, I decided that four wireframes using simple grayscale graphics would be enough to support my recommendations without detracting from the written work. I wonder, when the actual software development phase begins, if these wireframes will be sufficient, and how much they will reflect the final interface in the eventual OER repository.

 

References

Baskerville, R., & Wood-Harper, A. T. (1998). Diversity in information systems action research methods. European Journal of Information Systems, 7(2), 90–107. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000298

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems Thinker, 9(5), 2-3. Retrieved from https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system/

Performing Content Analysis

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One of the early design decisions I made during my research project was to include a content analysis along with interviews as part of my research methods. Interviews would provide great first-hand insights from teachers using Free Learning, however, I also wanted to take a broad look at OER repositories to see how they’re designed. Rather than performing a document analysis of existing research papers, I chose to use a content analysis approach to enable me to visit OER repositories and analyze their functionality. This enabled me to look across a range of websites and develop a coding system, which led to identifying common themes among the various repositories (Schreier, 2015). These themes complemented the themes that emerged from my interviews, which then informed the recommendations I developed.

Table 1. Example of tabular data from my content analysis.

Conducting the content analysis proved to be challenging because it was not something I had done previously in the program. I followed Schreier’s (2015) approach to coding to create a spreadsheet, which I used to identify functionality that was present or absent in each OER repository. I found the paper by Santos-Hermosa, Ferran-Ferrer, and Abadal (2017) to be a great help when choosing how to present my findings. Their paper included a wide-scale content analysis of over 100 repositories, which identified a number of different themes and metrics. Although on a much larger scale than my own content analysis, their paper presented its findings in easy-to-understand tables, grouped by theme. I used a similar approach to present the findings for my own content analysis, which enabled me to support the themes I had identified with tabular data (see Table 1). In the end, I analyzed 14 repositories during my content analysis. With more time and a larger scope, it would have been interesting to analyze more repositories and perhaps use alternate selection criteria, knowing what I now know about the importance that pedagogy and communities of practice have in my final recommendations.

 

References

Santos-Hermosa, G., Ferran-Ferrer, N. & Abadal, E. (2017). Repositories of Open Educational Resources: An assessment of reuse and educational aspects. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5), 84–120. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3063

Schreier, M. (2015). Qualitative Content Analysis. In Flick, U. (Ed.). (2013). The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis. Sage publishing.https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526416070

Conducting Interviews

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This research project provided my first opportunity, within the course of the MALAT program, to collect and analyze primary data. Since the course blanket ethics for the DLRCP allowed for up to 10 interviews, I knew early on in my planning process that I wanted to seize this exciting opportunity to talk to teachers first-hand and hear about their experiences with Free Learning. This meant that including interviews as part of my research methods was one of my first design decisions. However, how those interviews would work and what questions I would ask were areas that required further investigation.

Through research into qualitative methods and interview design, I decided that semi-structured interviews would be a good fit for this project. “The semi-structured interview is a popular data collection method” which is “both versatile and flexible” (Kallio, Pietiläm, Johnson, & Kangasniemi, 2016, p. 2955). It would enable my interview conversations to flow organically (Carruthers, 1990), and opened opportunities to ask for clarification or further information during the interview (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). Initially, through a conversation with my academic supervisor, I discovered that my challenge would be to narrow my questions down. I had created over twenty five questions during the draft of my interview questions, and I learned that to keep my interview flexible, I would need to narrow these down to about five questions. Do do this, I used sticky notes and wrote my questions down, then moved them around until I created groups of questions. I kept several of my original questions as prompts, but narrowed the final questions down to the following list:

  • Tell me about how you first heard about Free Learning and became involved with it. What attracted you to use it?
  • Walk me through your experience getting up and running with Free Learning.
  • Can you describe any challenges you faced, or continue to face, using Free Learning.
  • Tell me about the types of resources you used to create your Free Learning map.
  • Based on your experiences, what do you envision would help other teachers to get started using Free Learning?
  • Considering the topics we’ve discussed, are there any other thoughts you would like to share?

The last question, although not initially part of my five, was recommended by my academic supervisor and helped to broaden the interviews to include any additional thoughts or experiences from the participants. Before my interviews I worried that these questions would be too broad, and didn’t intersect with OER enough. However, these questions ended up being highly effective in revealing themes and ideas that I had not initially considered, and I truly enjoyed the experience of listening to the personal stories that interviewees shared during our conversations.

 

References

Carruthers, J. (1990). A Rationale for the Use of Semi‐structured Interviews. Journal of Educational Administration, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239010006046

Kallio, H., Pietilä, A. M., Johnson, M., & Kangasniemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological review: developing a framework for a qualitative semi-structured interview guide. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 72(12), 2954–2965. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13031

Rubin H. J. & Rubin I. S. (2005). Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing the Data, 2nd edn. SAGE, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Community of Inquiry in Self-Directed Learning

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View as a PDF: Community of Inquiry Infographic

Self-directed learning and a Community of Inquiry (CoI) are not mutually exclusive. However, learning by one’s self and learning as a group are often seen as opposites. Although a self-directed approach to learning may offer students more agency and flexibility in how and what they choose to learn (Hiemstra, 1994), it often suffers from too much focus on the self. Self-directed learning need not, and should not, be a solitary activity. Garrison (2015) argues that “thinking is deeply embedded in our environment and the shared experiences of those with whom we engage.” The theory of social constructivism suggests that we not only learn experientially, but that those experiences are contextualized and enhanced through social interaction. Students can learn, under their own direction, while also collaborating with others.

In my context, I teach a course called Free Learning at the secondary level in a K-12 school. Free Learning is both a pedagogical approach and an open-source online learning environment. Through this approach, “students chart their own learning through a varied map of challenges and experiences” (Parker, 2015). A Free Learning map is a network of units where each completed unit may unlock one or more connected units. This offers students a learning environment with scaffolded content along with the agency to choose their own path through the map. This year, with our students learning online, it is essential to consider effective frameworks for collaboration and social learning.

One of the challenges with a self-directed pedagogy is to create an environment that also facilitates teamwork and collaboration. In Free Learning, this is done by offering students to opportunity to enrol in units individually, in pairs, threes, fours, or fives. However, the affordances of a learning technology doesn’t mean students will seize this opportunity (Dron, 2014). As a facilitator of Free Learning, and any other self-directed approach to learning, it’s essential to help foster a mindset of collaborative learning. Rather than seeing themselves as a class of separate learners, students should be encouraged to see their group as a cohort of like-minded learners, each discovering and sharing new knowledge as they explore the Free Learning map together.

To support social learning, I have developed an infographic to apply a Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to a self-directed context. My infographic offers strategies for facilitators based on teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007; Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes & Garrison, 2013). These strategies aim to help overcome the solitary focus of self-directed learning and encourage students to work collaboratively. By applying these strategies to my own teaching practice, I hope to help students see the benefit of working together, and foster a mindset of collaboration and co-creation of knowledge in my class. Collaboration in a community of learners, especially in a classroom setting, is more than just group work: it’s a practice of collectively discovering, sharing, questioning, and reflecting on new ideas.

References

Dron, J. (2014). Innovation and How we Change. Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda, 237–265.

Garrison, D. R., & Arbaugh, J. B. (2007). Researching the community of inquiry framework: Review, issues, and future directions. Internet and Higher Education, 10(3), 157–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2007.04.001

Garrison, D. R. (2015). Thinking collaboratively: Learning in a community of inquiry. Routledge.

Hiemstra, R. (1994). Self-directed learning. The sourcebook for self-directed learning, 920.

Parker, R. (2015). Free Learning [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://rossparker.org/free-learning/

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Chapter 3: Facilitation. Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Athabasca University Press. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120229/ebook/03_Vaughan_et_al_2013-Teaching_in_Blended_Learning_Environments.pdf

Thoughts on Digital Facilitation

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3 thoughts or ideas you have about digital facilitation:

  • My first thought about digital facilitation is that I have much to learn! This course has come at a great time. Our classes in Hong Kong have resumed as online-only, so each idea or theory from this course stands to offer something tangible that I can try out in my classes right away.
  • A key consideration for digital facilitation is that it is distinct from face-to-face facilitation. Experiences that feel natural in person can become tiring online, expectations for attention span and technical aptitude are different, and the learning experience itself needs to transform rather than be transplanted.
  • Synchronous facilitation, such as the online learning we’ve seen a lot recently, should account for timezones and be empathetic of peoples demands on their time. This may take the form of recorded sessions, as well as polling students for optimal times, or varying the times of live video sessions to offer more possibilities for students to join.

2 questions you have about digital facilitation:

  • When promoting social spaces and community in an online setting, how do facilitators create a space that students feel motivated to authentically participate in, rather than resorting to making participation a mandatory part of the course grade?
  • When facilitating a video setting for younger students, should they be forced to always have their camera on and be present? What about considerations for students who may feel embarrassed about their home setting, or may not have a quiet space available to them during a synchronous learning activity?

1 metaphor or simile about digital facilitation:

  • Good digital facilitation is like a rhythm. Every lesson or learning experience can’t happen at the exact same pace. There needs to be variety and variation, but not too much, just enough that it creates rhythm and flow. For example, weekly synchronous chats, mixed with asynchronous reflections, mixed with self-paced activities. A rhythm isn’t completely random: there’s some structure and repetitiveness in the variation, to create a difference in kind of learning as well as difference in volume of learning. The result is a learning experience that flows together while having both variation and repetition.

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Why not choose open?

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As I concluded my research and worked on formulating my ideas into a final paper, I couldn’t shake a lingering question that had emerged through my inquiry: Why not choose open? When a content creator is already choosing to give away their work for free, why not also make it open? I wondered what barriers might hold people back, and considered several possible reasons for this choice. Among these these: a misconception of open, and a fear of losing control.

Open can be hard to understand. In the 10th anniversary of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2017), the project creators recognize that open licensing struggles from ambiguity. They admit that “after a decade of passionate advocacy, the need for broader awareness of open education persists” (p. 4). However, the awareness required isn’t necessarily that open licensing exists. Many people are aware that Creative Commons and open source exists. However, I wonder if not many people actually know what these licenses mean or how they started. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration creators noted that, after 10 years, “the challenge is not in reaching enough people, but rather in articulating the meaning and value of open education in a way that resonates with mainstream audiences” (p. 4). Advocates of openness need to help people see how open licensing can have a meaningful impact on their own lives, and not just see it as something other people use.

Open can feel like a loss of control. We have been conditioned, in part by the media, to believe that copyright is a necessary good, otherwise theft of intellectual property would run rampant. However, Lessig (2004) argues that this is not the case. Copyright and patents, particularly the kind that hamper creativity, are a relatively recent development in the course of human history. Lessig argues that that Internet can promote a free and open culture, but that corporations are working hard to prevent this. “Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so“ (p. 30). Open licensing doesn’t mean losing control, creators still own a work that has an open license. What it means is empowering others to learn from and build on the past.

To wrap up this blog post, I’d like to leave my readers with one parting thought experiment. If you were to create something—a book, a course, a work of art—and this thing were to take you a lot of time to create, say 500 hours, would you choose to release it with an open license? If not, what are some reasons why you wouldn’t? If so, why, and would you have made the same choice before starting this Masters?

References

Cape Town Open Education Declaration 10th Anniversary (2017). Retrieved June 1, 2020, from https://www.capetowndeclaration.org/cpt10/

Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press. Retrieved from http://www.free-culture.cc/

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What is the cost of free EdTech?

Sandra3 Comments

Recently my team members and I began considering the concept of educational video from a critical perspective. To better understand our chosen technology, we selected the video learning platform Khan Academy, and we undertook the process of enrolling in and progressing through an online lesson about Carol Dweck’s (2006) Growth Mindset. On the surface level, the learning experience through Khan Academy provided colourful illustrations, narrative mini-lessons, and video explanations. The course progressed from one idea to the next, asking the learner open-ended questions between each section. As I read the lessons and watched the videos, I aimed to sharpen my analytical skills and consider what issues lurk beneath the surface of platforms like this. Selwyn (2010) implores academics and educators to “look beyond issues of learning” and consider the “social realities of technology use” (p. 66). In adopting this approach, I focused my critical inquiry towards my personal context of open source and Open Educational Resources (OER).

Free is an enticing word. As an adverb, it offers something “without cost or payment,” and as an adjective, it enables one to act without “the control or in the power of another” (“Free,” n.d.). Free is a particularly attractive concept in EdTech, where many schools are looking to tighten their bottom line. Khan Academy represents a free video learning platform, offering their content under the mission “to provide free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere” (Khan Academy, n.d.). However, as I considered the broader implications of this mission, I wondered if free video platforms really are without a cost. Both the words free and cost have nuanced meanings (“Gratis versus libre,” n.d.). This line of inquiry led me to ask: What is the cost of free EdTech?

Free educational content is not necessarily open. Wiley (2014) defines five properties of open content: retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute. Free video platforms like Khan Academy may offer their videos freely, but their content is often proprietary (Khan Academy, n.d.). Open versus proprietary is an important distinction, one which the word free does not encompass. As an advocate of open content, I wondered what the societal impact of learning platforms like Khan Academy could be if people came to see free yet proprietary EdTech as the highest ideal. Would teachers be dazzled by free content and not realize that they could have genuinely open content? Could OER platforms lose their traction or funding in the face of proprietary platforms backed by billionaire philanthropists? Are many teachers aware of how to find open content, and how to recognize restrictive licenses?

If video platforms like Khan Academy become the norm, what are we missing out on? Losing one thing in exchange for another constitutes a cost (“Cost,” n.d.), and a loss of openness may be just one of the many hidden costs of free EdTech.

In undertaking this critical inquiry, I recognize that my perspective is not unbiased. As an open source developer and advocate of open pedagogy, I am passionate about the impact that a philosophy of openness can have on education. However, I realize that open source and OER are not a silver bullet. As I continue this inquiry and develop a learning plan, I will need to consider a wide range of research and pay specific attention to the biases that may be implicit in my initial arguments. I’d be interested to hear thoughts and additional perspectives from fellow MALAT students that may help me refine this line of inquiry.

 

References

Cost. (n.d.). In Lexico Dictionary by Oxford. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/cost

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House Incorporated.

Free. (n.d.). In Lexico Dictionary by Oxford. Retrieved from https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/free

Gratis versus libre. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 22, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

Khan Academy. (n.d.). Khan Academy | Free online courses, lessons & practice. Retrieved from https://www.khanacademy.org

Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(1), 65–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00338.x

Wiley, D. (2014). Defining the “open” in open content and open educational resources. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/

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Reflections on Leadership and Proximity

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At the beginning of this course, we looked at leadership traits. What attributes lend themselves to good leadership? Many of these attributes, drawn from Kouzes and Posner’s (2011) characteristics of admired leaders, related to supportiveness, trust, cooperation, and communication. Reflecting on the readings and discussions throughout this course, I’d like to add one more item to this list: proximity. I don’t mean physical proximity, although that has certainly been at the forefront of the past several weeks. Proximity to me, as a quality of leadership, works hand-in-hand with other attributes and modifies their effectiveness and authenticity.

The language a leader chooses to use conveys proximity through their communication. Does a leader choose language that includes them in the larger group, such as “we,” or do they distance themselves through “you” and “they”? Proximity, in this way, can be seen as a facet of reflective leadership, by cultivating an awareness of the behaviours and language that brings a leader closer to their team (Castelli, 2016). In remote communication—as many of us have experienced these past weeks and months—the responsiveness of a leader can also convey a strong sense of proximity. Timely, frequent updates create a sense of leadership being close to the issue at hand.

Emotional proximity also shines through in authentic leadership. Closing the distance between the team and its leader can be a matter of word choice: perhaps a personal anecdote or a vulnerable moment. Self-awareness and mindfulness are essential to reflective leadership (Castelli, 2016), and enable leaders to build closer emotional proximity to their team. Leaders need to be able to share the same burdens of stress, express the same frustrations, and celebrate the same small wins as their team.

Proximity is also integral to change and project management. Does a leader set a directive into motion from afar and expect it to waterfall down the hierarchy as each person plays their role, or do they move with the project at each step of the way? A leader who has proximity to a project can support more effectively through direct observation. Rather than asking, “how is the project going?” they have a close-up view of the project and can ask meaningful questions, such as “how was the response to your presentation in the meeting on Monday?”

Looking to the future, I’d like to cultivate a leadership style of proximity. In projects that I lead, I’d like to remain close to the issues and close to the team members so I can support them from a first-hand perspective. How can I cultivate this leadership style? It likely involves aspects of adaptive leadership to remain close to individual needs and goals (Khan, 2017). It may involve qualities of values-based leadership to help people see their goals and help them achieve what they cannot do by themselves (O’Toole, 2008). Importantly, it should involve developing the leadership capacity in others (Huggins, 2017). Maintaining proximity enables leaders to see and support the qualities that allow others to do their best work.

I recognize that not every leader has the ability to maintain close proximity to each person or project they lead, but overall an awareness of proximity may help them remain closer than they would otherwise be. It can be easy to become distant from delegated tasks, but as a leader, it is essential to remain close enough to retain a clear perspective. Change cannot be expected to happen blindly with an initial burst of energy: it must be guided down a well-defined path.

Proximity, now in its most tangible sense, is something many of us have been deprived of in the past weeks and months. However, as we move forward into the uncertain weeks ahead, we can look to find different ways to express our proximity and support each other from afar.

 
References

Castelli, P. A. (2016). Reflective leadership review: a framework for improving organisational performance. Journal of Management Development, 35(2), 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMD-08-2015-0112

Huggins, K. S. (2017). Developing Leadership Capacity in Others: An Examination of High School Principals’ Personal Capacities for Fostering Leadership. International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership, 12(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.22230/ijepl.2017v12n1a670

Khan, N. (2017). Adaptive or transactional leadership in current higher education: A brief comparison. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 18(3), 178–183. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i3.3294

Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (2011). The characteristics of admired leaders. In Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from Books 24×7 e-book database.

O’Toole, J. (2008). Notes Toward a Definition of Values-Based Leadership. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 1(1). Retrieved from https://scholar.valpo.edu/jvbl/vol1/iss1/10

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Change as a Reactive Force

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Not all change is planned for. When my school went online-only for the first time on February 3, 2020, we needed to implement a wide-scale change on short notice. All instruction—from kindergarten to grade 12—was to move to online learning platforms until further notice. Unlike projects that can be planned months in advance, our shift to online learning needed to happen with a single week’s notice, occurring over a holiday when many people were travelling. Compounding the issue was the uncertainty of not knowing when classes would resume: we are now headed into our tenth week of campus closure, with initial expectations of only a week or two. Nevertheless, change happens. Project plans were put into place as well as continuously adjusted. In this kind of reactive change, concepts like organizational readiness can only be assessed in hindsight. Yet, I believe there are valuable lessons to be learned from the on-the-fly project planning that occurred in our situation.

Despite an unprecedented scenario unfolding, it was not chaos. Early on, leadership set a clear objective that our school would continue to deliver high-quality education online to the best of our abilities. From a systems theory perspective, the shift to online learning was a change that affected every stakeholder in the school: from our teachers, students, and parents to our support staff, office administrators, IT technicians, and cleaning staff. To put this plan into action, we needed a high degree of communication and collaboration, all online and all on short notice. The project life-cycle of initiation, planning, implementation, and closing still occurred (Watt, 2014), albeit condensed into a matter of days and hours.

Uncertainty was the first and most poignant barrier we encountered. Leadership was in a difficult position: people look to leaders to make decisions, yet faced with measures beyond their control, there were few absolutes to be offered. Leadership could not give definite return dates for school, they could only provide plans pegged to milestones a week or two in advance. Aspects of reflective leadership became essential: school admin needed to be highly tuned to the emotional and behavioural situation of their community (Castelli, 2016),

Distance was also a barrier. Throughout the first month of this situation, our school leaders were spread throughout various countries and timezones. In this situation, adaptive leadership helped our admin respond to a complex situation where environmental, cultural, and societal factors were involved (Khan, 2017). Having a strong adaptive leadership style helped our admin rely on each other and on teachers to gather data make informed decisions.

As the weeks wore on, a new barrier emerged: student stress was on the rise, motivation was dwindling, and parent involvement was highly variable. Online learning relies heavily on organization skills and self-motivation, but not all students are strong in these areas, and many were in struggling with emotional stress. This situation required an evolving needs analysis, and involved adapting and reducing the workload for students, as well as connecting students with staff to help support their mental and physical health.

As the campus closure continued, teacher workload and stress was also mounting. It’s not easy to transform lessons that were intended to be delivered in-person to an online-only format. Teachers worked hard to connect with students through a variety of platforms, but the workload was often well beyond a regular school day. Change management as a reactive force was essential. We did not have broad sweeping plans in place, nevertheless aspects of change managment occurred. Leadership needed to consolidate improvements and create short term wins (Kotter, 1996). They also needed to create a shared vision of what online learning looked like for teachers, to ensure teachers did not feel pressured to work beyond expectations. Incidentally, in reactive change management, a sense of urgency is already well established.

There is clarity in hindsight. Under scrutiny, hindsight can find flaws in even the most polished plan. However, I think it’s fair to say our leadership made sound decisions with the information they had. I think one lesson that can be learned from this situation is pace: a reactive change does not have to be a frenetic change. The stages of change management and project planning can still occur, but they have to be progressive—in smaller steps—to leave room for adaptation. New technologies can be adopted, but not all of them, and not all at once.

Our campus closures are not over and our online learning continues as we go into week ten. As the rest of the world begins school closures on their continents, it is inspiring to see so many educators sharing their ideas and best practices. There is much to be learned from change as a reactive force, and I think leaders around the world would be wise to listen to the voices from educators who are learning on-the-fly and sharing their experiences.

 
References

Castelli, P. A. (2016). Reflective leadership review: a framework for improving organisational performance. Journal of Management Development, 35(2), 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMD-08-2015-0112

Khan, N. (2017). Adaptive or transactional leadership in current higher education: A brief comparison. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 18(3), 178–183. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i3.3294

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Watt, A. (2014). Project Management. Victoria, BC: BCcampus. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/

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