Abstract

For the past four years, participants on an initial teacher education course leading to AFHEA have been given an assignment in Wikispaces that involves creating a blog post on teaching and learning, replicating online teacher professional development. It has enabled them to deepen and share their knowledge on a teaching-related topic of interest, in some cases to develop their digital skills and to reflect on their experience of the task with course design for their own students in mind. Participants were offered the option of using their names or remaining anonymous, as it is possible for members of the public to view the Wikispace. After two cohorts had completed the task, a small research project was then carried out to explore participants’ experience of and attitudes towards this type of assignment. The task was redesigned for the third (2016) cohort in light of the responses and currently involves describing a novel way of teaching something (posted on the relevant department page) and commenting on another participant’s post (from any department).The fourth cohort also contributed to the 2016 space, so it is now full of teaching ideas. This summer Wikispaces shut down so the 2016-18 Wikispace resource has been saved in a Google site: https://sites.google.com/view/instiltandlspace/home

Educational Developer, RHUL https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ @frazski