Like many educators during the time of COVID-19, I feel a certain level of dissonance when thinking about what I am leaving behind in the classroom in order to shift years’ worth of work to an online space.
The Bristol Institute for Teaching and learning (BILT) conference “Tales from the Digital Classroom: Teaching in Uncertain Times” held on 2 July 2020 provided a great opportunity to pause and reflect on what it means to be moving from a physical place (the classroom) to an online space which at times feels a bit more ethereal. During the 10-minute session, I shared an early preview of the work we are doing at the University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to reimagine how once tangible artefacts of learning – like post-its and research walls – translate into digital and hybrid forms.
My starting point was to look at the place that we are leaving behind – the physical classroom environment.
True to the interdisciplinary nature of the innovation programmes, I have taken inspiration from the work of anthropologists and geographers regarding ‘place’ and ‘space.’ According to Canadian Geographer Edward Relph, without a thorough understanding of the human significance of a place, it’s impossible to know how to repair that place (Seamon and Sowers 2008). In this case, that means bringing this a sense of place into an online space.
Above is an image of our “place.” This is a typical day in the Postgraduate Room at the Centre for Innovation. You can see it has a very “lived-in” look, here students take major ownership of the space. The meaning this room has for me is about the type of activities it enables.
Not to mention, I’m comfortable in this room. I know what I can expect and I have a certain level of control over the environment. It’s predictable.
Yet now if ever, we are facing an unpredictable world.
So we are looking at how to build up this sense of place. To appropriately recreate that classroom feel in an online environment.
There is a huge range of tools from Zoom, to Teams, to Blackboard that we have at our disposal to start to construct this online place for teaching and learning.
For us, what is missing is the collaboration element that was so apparent in the photo of the classroom, so we’ve been exploring a virtual collaboration tool called Mural.
Mural serves as a Virtual Workspace. As a visual collaboration tool, it allows for less talking and more doing. By making conversations tangible on these virtual post-its, team members see not only that they were heard, but how they were heard.
It allows for Visual Problem Solving – allowing students to align and reach decisions faster - and enables Continuous Collaboration which is core to the Centre’s Project-Based Learning approach. Students can work between classes, either individually or as a team, and connect to the lecturers for feedback on their progress as needed.
As one of our key aims at the Centre is to prepare graduates for the world of work, it’s also industry-relevant a tool that organisations such as Intuit, IBM, ETrade, Trello. Even the design agencies I freelance with are using to enable collaboration in our teams and with our clients.
In the last four weeks of teaching, we have already begun to test this idea of bringing a sense of place within the online space. For example, one of our Postgraduate teams worked on a client brief with the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) using Mural as a collaborative workspace to support research analysis, manage the project roadmap, rapidly prototype their final concept and present and get feedback from tutors and the client.
Of course, a tool alone doesn't create a sense of place. We are pairing virtual workspaces with strategies for remote facilitation and teamwork that are used in HE and as well as best practice in flexible and blended learning.
View the full presentation on Mural >>