Dive into deep water - Three takeaways from supporting an online course

Team collaboration. Learning while doing. Innovating together.

I was happy to volunteer to become a Virtual Classroom Assistant (VCA), as I like learning new things, like to be engaged in cooperative projects, and I had some prior experiences with eLearning in my previous jobs in Hungary.

Team collaboration. Learning while doing. Innovating together.

My first VCA mission came quickly, right the following week after I answered the call for VCAs. I have just taken two upskilling sessions run by our #digital technologies team. So, this first mission came quickly, and it was quite unique.

• This was one of the first weeks of on-line course deliveries.

• It was the final module week for an Executive MBA cohort, normally full of group activities to leave lasting memories for the students.

• There were complex virtual classroom activities, three faculty members delivering the course.

• There were a lot of group activities for which we needed to use the breakout room function of Zoom. Well, to be honest, our digital technologies team spoke about this function in the Zoom training, but I have never done it “live” before. So there were some challenging moments managing the first breakout room session for this course – to the extent that while supporting this part of the courses, at some point I was in simultaneous conversation with our digital technologies team about some needed nuances of using this function. At the end, we managed to bring the students back and forth between the plenary session and the breakout rooms several times during the day.

The three main takeaway lessons for me from my first VCA mission are the followings:

• A unique way of team #collaboration: It was a great experience of intense and huge team collaboration. The three faculty members, the programme manager of the cohort, another VCA and myself as VCAs, and the whole AV team in the background and our digital learning technologist. Programme delivery is a team effort under “normal circumstances”, when we are in the school building, but with the online delivery it is an enhanced team collaboration.

• “Learning while doing”: As the switching to online programme delivery has come unexpectedly not leaving sufficient time to fully develop online delivery, we all needed to learn the trick of the trade while doing it.

• Innovating together: As we were walking on grounds where we have not walked before, we needed to find solutions for quickly and innovatively for every eventuality. For example, we have created a WhatsApp group as a communication channel among faculty, programme manager and VCA, so we were able to communicate with each other during the Zoom session. This proved to be a very useful and important tool for our collaboration.

My experience is that the students are appreciating all the effort we put collaboratively into delivering education under circumstances we have not dreamt of couple of months ago.

I learnt a lot during my first VCA mission. To be able to collaborate effectively and in unknow circumstances, we needed creative thinking, our full presence, collaboration, ‘alertness’, humility, multi-channel communication, ‘servant’ approach and some #humility – just to name some of the needed ingredients.

This is an exciting road of “going forward”, walking into the new phase of #education, because when we will return to the physical school building, that will not be a return to the “old normal”, but it will be a slightly new era where we will bring with us the learnings from these #online collaborative experiences.

This new era we live in gives #opportunities to learn new things, to experiment with new ways of doing things, to find more efficient ways of doing things.

Thank you all for this memorable collaboration and learning journey!