OOPS! OPPs - Open Online Professional Sharing Opportunities through Perpetual Pilots

Overview:

Staying abreast of effective, relevant teaching skills, while having to deliver content-heavy courses, is a common struggle for new and seasoned faculty in all fields. Ever-changing technology and rapidly evolving online culture undermine the “traditional pace” of acquiring pedagogical experience and wisdom. Other equally perplexing challenges include -- sparking enthusiasm among students in unrelated majors, building morale among adjunct instructors working without possibility of benefits, and maintaining motivation of tenured research faculty who are also required to teach.

The “Open Online Professional Sharing Opportunities through Perpetual Pilots”, or “OOPS! OPPs”, is an experimental reiterative multidisciplinary team-operation that provides pragmatic real-time professional development for faculty, adjunct instructors, graduate teaching assistants, instructional designers, and technology support staff alike. It also serves as live in-situ modeling for student collaborative learning.

While traditional professional development strategies for instructional design and delivery highlight best practices and successful outcomes, in contrast, “OOPS! OPPs” focuses on learning from errors and mistakes, utilizing a blend of F2F, open crowdsourcing, and online documentation, to aid in analysis and synthesis of learning across all stakeholders.

Challenges addressed:

• Maintaining stakeholders’ motivation, stamina and resilience during innovation transition

• Sustaining reliable, accessible and effective support pre/post/throughout innovation transition

• Functioning efficiently within existing budgetary, contextual, and stakeholder limitations

• Producing tangible, measurable, scalable, and validated evidence of learning for all stakeholders

Team description:

The OOPS! Community of Practice (COP) comprises full time faculty, adjunct instructors, graduate teaching assistants (GTA’s), instructional designers (ID’s), IT Services (ITS), and administrators. The antecedent pilot to OOPS! was a small scale semester-long (15-week) experimental COP called “Blended Bootcamp”, which focused on identifying best practices in blended course design and delivery, through professional development and community building. In total, the initial cohort comprised 21 participants, across 13 departments, in 4 institutions of higher education, involving over 20 courses.

LINK to team details: https://go.unl.edu/OOPS_people

One goal was to examine the effectiveness and sustainability of various stakeholder incentive modes. While all participants entered voluntarily, each had different motivators. Full time faculty were motivated by sheer curiosity, and the promise of gaining extra support from ID’s. Adjunct instructors jumped on the opportunity to access ID/ITS/GTA support, which otherwise would be limited/inaccessible. GTA’s gained 3-credits through a graduate special projects course, with the COP leader as their practicum supervisor. Another ID from a different institution, who happened to be an alumnus, was invited to participate for mutual research benefit. ITS and administration participation was by default, based on established job scope.

Design approach:

The “OOPS!” concept emerged serendipitously during the pilot phase, as an “accidental” outcome.

By week 9 of the pilot, only 8 of the 17 listed original participants maintained persistent collaboration, and only 4 persevered with systematic documentation and sharing of their Active Learning. A roundtable format presentation during a local symposium served as the midpoint evaluation. While the group reported mediocre progress on the original goal of identifying best practices, the open-sharing dialog during the symposium unveiled surprising observations of the pilot. Several themes and recommendations emerged from this peer review exercise, including -- the value of open-sharing failed efforts within a safe environment, the power of leveraging public events to ensure self-sustaining renewable motivation, and the ability to quickly and openly identify, accept, and troubleshoot failures, so that the next innovation iteration can be designed, deployed and assessed in rapid succession.

Subsequently, the original COP expanded its collaborative reach and developed the wordplay/acronym “OOPS! OPPs”. In this expanded proposal, each iteration would function as a “perpetual-pilot” and would culminate in a public crowdsourcing “OOPS! Workshop”, while the overall model would be driven by a “team-OPPs” (operation). The terminology "perpetual-pilot" mirrors the already established technical term "perpetual-beta" from the internet programming world, intentionally implying the "never-ending" internet landscape changes that have given rise to a new user-culture, one where success/survival is dependent on one's ability to consistently be adept, agile and at ease with rapid changing goal-posts, or the absence of them altogether.

Stakeholders and Scope:

This innovative (and radical) “OOPS! OPPs” solution benefits all participating stakeholders -- faculty, ID’s, ITS, admin, and students -- with zero additional financial investment. The only necessary “investment” is the willingness for participants to publicly and productively “make, break and shake off mistakes”, and the collective cooperation of the overall community of practice to provide professional and personal support for each other.

The scope of “OOPS! OPPs” impacts all participating stakeholders, with zero additional financial investment. This multi-tier systemic solution functions within the existing academic framework by leveraging existing infrastructure and human resources. By pooling together stakeholders of different experience-levels, job-categories and subject-disciplines, the jigsaw combination of personal-motivators results in self-sustaining symbiotic relationships between the participants. Even if/when some collaborative efforts bomb, the open acceptance attitude and rapid reiteration solutions ensure that the summative outcomes are cumulatively successful.

Impact and Evidence:

The impact of OOPS! was evident even during the initial pilot phase. Although some of the original goals were unmet, the actual learning outcomes surpassed expectations. All active participants experienced multifaceted spontaneous learning from error, and the collective shared findings revealed an array of serendipitous disruptive innovation. Spontaneous crisis induced small group collaboration produced multiple just-in-time creative solutions for assignments-gone-wrong, resolved conflicts during student peer review exercises, optimized instructor feedback, reduced instructor grading time, increased instructor professional development, and replenished motivation overall.

Replicability and Next Steps:

A diverse cohort of instructors were targeted in the initial pilot phase to examine the applicability in different fields -- education, STEM, arts, humanities, athletic training. In addition, an alumnus participant, an ID in a different institution, was invited to  engage in a parallel intervention, to see if the OOPS! methodology could be replicated. The outcomes were better than expected. Learning from OOPS! was experienced by all active participants.

One participant, a Program Coordinator, plans to repeat/leverage the same COP format to prepare for an upcoming accreditation. Another instructor shared her positive experiences with colleagues in her subject field, which led to a (self-motivated learner-led) request for professional development from that group. And the community college alumnus-ID was asked to expand her course offerings the subsequent semester, to two more satellite campuses via online mode. Based on these preliminary “OOPS!-successes”, an even wider range / larger number of courses and participants will be explored in subsequent OOPS! OPPs iterations.