Competent Digital Educators use digital technologies to collaborate with other educators, sharing and exchanging knowledge and experience, and collaboratively innovating pedagogic practices.

The 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey notes a number of benefits and reasons for educators to collaborate professionally. Those that collaborate, report greater levels of job satisfaction; greater use of strategies that encourage learners to think more deeply about problems; have more positive views on collegiality. According to the report, professional collaboration takes the form of:

• Educators consulting other educators on the progress and problems of learners

• Educators exchanging teaching material with other educators

• Educators receiving feedback on their teaching practice from other educators

• To a lesser extent, collaboration of own professional development and team teaching.

The DigCompEdu Framework also states that competent digital educators typically should be able to: 

• use digital technologies to collaborate with other educators, on a dedicated project or task.

• use digital technologies to share and exchange knowledge, resources, and experiences with colleagues and peers.

• use digital technologies to collaboratively develop educational resources.

• use professional collaborative networks to explore and reflect on new pedagogic practices and methods.

• use professional collaborative networks as a source for one’s own professional development.

In this section of the lab, we will explore the following digital technologies that will make it possible for educators to do some of the above. 

1. We will explore the Google App, Jamboard to learn how we can collaborate with other educators on our education projects. 

2. We will revisit Learning Designer to learn how we can collaborate with other educators during the design phase of our education projects.

3. We will learn how to use Moodle's backup and restore functions to share courses or parts of courses with other educators.

4.     We will explore professional collaborative networks to build on our pedagogic practices.

The experiment for this section of the lab will look at how you collaborated on Jamboard; how you converted the fruits of this collaboration into a Learning Design; how you were able to share this learning design as a Google Doc; how you were able to implement the design into a "wireframe" Moodle course that can be backed up and shared with others; how you were able to reflect on collaborative networks to help you in your educational project.

The purpose of this section is to introduce participants to the Jamboard app on Google to collaborate. Participants can also use this app to get their students to collaborate on projects. 

Watch these videos on Jamboard. First, the advertisement on Jamboard .... 

 ...then how teachers use it...

Go to this course’s Jamboard; Add your thoughts to the topic under discussion by adding a “Sticky Note.”

Now, create your own Jamboard. Ask your collaborators to help you with an educational project (or course) that you are considering. They should suggest some activities and or resources that you should include in your course. Send the link to it to some participants that you may have added earlier (in order to do the messenger board assignment previously). The idea is that you will use the feedback that you get from your collaborators to develop some activities and resources in your practice Moodle course. (Later in this section you will be shown how to make and restore backups in Moodle as a method for educators to collaborate; so, it is important that you follow this step.)

For starters: Look at this section's learning design on the Learning Designer's platform. 

There is also a Google Docs version of this design on Google Drive. You can find it here.

The purpose of this section is to build on our prior engagement with Learning Designer and to share our designs by interacting with Google Docs. The collaboration happens via Google Docs, but could also happen directly in LD. 

Please refer to the orientation course on how to use the Learning Designing platform.

Once you are in your Learning Design (that contains some Teaching and Learning Activities) click on "Turn Editing On".

This will open a new view on your Learning design that allows you to do a number of things:

1. By clicking here you will have several options to export your learning design. You can export it as an MS word file. For now, export your design as an MS word file. As you'll know by now, MS Word files can be uploaded to Google Drive as a Google Doc file and shared with others. Later, when you do your experiment for this section of the lab, you will be required to do just that. Note that you may also export your Learning Design as an LDJ document (that can later be imported by another experimenter into one of their Learning Designs. A very interesting feature is that you can export your design to Moodle. What happens in effect is that the LD platform creates a Moodle backup file that can be imported into your course. Read the Moodle export guidance here, before attempting this.)

2. You can share a link to your design with other educators by selecting "Share".

3. Go for sharing the direct link, not the shortened URL. (I found it doesn't work.)

4. Simply click "Copy" to copy the link to your design into your clipboard. Later you can then paste it anywhere else.

To do the experiment at the end of this section of the Lab you will need to share both a URL to your learning design as well as a URL to a Google doc that contains a word-processed version of your learning design. 

A great way for educators to collaborate on educational projects is for them to share courses or components of courses that were created in Moodle. To do this, one has to be able to copy and share these components amongst colleagues. Moodle's backup and restore functionality help with this.

On this site, your course will be backed up automatically every day. Please go here to learn about backups in general. 

Restoring courses: Please go here to learn about restoring courses.

These are the steps we follow when we want to back up or restore a course. You have to be in the course and you have to be the teacher of that course, so you can try the following with your practice course:

First, click on the now-famous Gear Icon to open the course management settings.

When in (1) Course Settings, you'll notice the (2) Backup and (3) Restore options. When backing up a course there are several options to consider, please explore those. One of the important options is to not back up the entire course, but only a section or an activity in a course. Please think about all these options before deciding to make a backup. For example, if you have developed a quiz that relies on questions in a question bank and you want to share the quiz with a colleague, you'll have to back up the quiz and the question bank.

The restore functionality is also important. You can either retore from an external backup file (1) or from several areas on the server. E.g. you may have backed something up to the course backup area, as I did on 28 Jan 2022 as per (2) below, or you can choose backup stuff to a private backup area as I did on 17 May 2021, or you can restore from files that are automatically backed up every day Monday to Friday (3). 10 Automated backups are kept.

In your practice course, you will hopefully create something useful that you will reuse later in real life. When you are ready to move your practice course to real life, the backup facility will be useful. Please note: Backing up stuff takes time.

Here is a link to a backup file on Google Drive of only this section of this course; I'm sharing it with you so that you can restore it in your course as a trial. Download it to your hard drive and then, go to the restore function in your course, drag and drop it from your machine to restore. I say again. Backing up and restoring stuff takes time, so please be patient.

You will have to do the above steps to complete the lab experiment at the end of this section. You'll be asked to back up your course, save the backup to Google Drive, share the link with others, and ask them to restore your course into one of their courses as a means to collaborate on course development.

In this article, the authors set out to define the four key action steps to starting and developing a successful collaborative network.

1. Organize people around a shared vision and purpose. (I.e. the stuff leaders do all the time.)
2. Design (and presumably establish) an organizational structure that will support success in achieving the purpose.
3. Cultivate a culture of engagement and shared responsibility.
4. Continue to develop the network's capacity, capability, and purpose.

In my view, the principles discussed in the article are applicable in all education sectors, not only the tertiary sector. Do you agree with this view? What collaborative networks do you engage with? How were they established? Are they meeting their purpose? 

Now for this section's experiment: Answer the above questions in the Question and Answer forum below. Once you have answered, the rest of the experiment for this part of the lab will be opened to you. It contains a quiz with 11 questions.  You must achieve 12 out of 20 points to proceed to the final Question and Answer forum it will be rated by other participants; you need 66/100 to be awarded the badge after completing the feedback on this section. 

This concludes this section on Professional Collaboration. In this section, we experimented successfully with: 

• Jamboard as a means of collaboration;
• Learning Designer as a means of sharing our learning designs with other educators directly via a link and via Google Docs;
• Moodle's backup facility as another means of sharing developed Moodle courses or sections of courses with other developers;
• Thoughts on establishing collaboration networks.

There is a badge up for grabs! Make sure you have completed:

• Forum - Collaborative Networks
• Quiz - Professional Collaboration Quiz
• Forum - Professional Collaboration Lab Experiment
• Feedback - Feedback on Professional Collaboration