Tag Archives: workshop

ULearn – ready, set, go

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This week, well today till Friday, is conference week. Hundreds of teachers are traveling to Christchurch to attend ULearn. Although there are still frequent aftershocks, 20 alone during the last 24 hours with one being measured at 5.0, most are minor, and I didn’t even feel the one just at 11:36 a.m. The Christchurch Quake Map is a fantastic though horrific visualization of all the quakes that have happened since September 4, 2010.

I flew in rather early today thinking that I needed to be at a workshop, but that engagement was canceled. Thus, I take the time to work and put the finishing touches on my Mahara workshop which will take place tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. Christ’s College, where my breakout session will take place, has great computer labs. It should be fun to explore Mahara with the 25 participants tomorrow.

A great aside: We have fantastic sunny spring weather and the forecast says it stays that way until Friday. :-)

Later today we will set up our “Open Source Schools” stand in the exhibitor hall (stand #20) where I will be found for most of the time till Friday. Conference participants can win a Flip camera. More info will be available at the stand.

Let the conference begin!

I am a PRINCE2 Practitioner

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Thursday, 27 May 2010, also brought another good news along besides my visa having been issued. I am officially a PRINCE2 Practitioner (the certificate still takes a bit to be issued).

During my search for a new job, I had come across the PRINCE2 certification, a project management method, a couple of times in UK postings. I had already done project management at the University of Munich for the EU-funded project “imMEDIAte TEACHing” (and I should find out basically ever since), but had learned everything “on the job” and not methodically. Thus, I thought it would be a good thing to prepare for my new job by refreshing my PM knowledge and do so by using a specific method.

PRINCE2 (Projects in Controlled Environments) is a PM method developed by the UK government, but is recognized around the world. As it is generic, it can be applied to any project in any field no matter how small or big the project is.

The certification for PRINCE2 is split up into two exams: Foundation and Practitioner.

The Foundation exam is for everybody involved in a project. Thus, it can be made sure that everybody understands the terminology, the basic themes and processes of PRINCE2 and knows the responsibilities of the individual roles. This exam tests definitions, the relations between processes etc. It is a multiple-choice exam with questions that are not related to each other.

The Practitioner exam is a further step for the project managers themselves. In this multiple-choice exam, the testee receives a project scenario and all questions relate to it. In this exam, PRINCE2 needs to be applied to the scenario.

The preparation for these exams can be done individually by reading the 327-page manual “Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2″ and answering exam prep questions in books that can be bought. However, many training companies also offer preparation courses either face-to-face or online. As the exams are rather expensive (£585 for both), I decided to take a course.

After some shopping around, I opted for the ILX Group‘s PRINCE2 Gold Pack which includes (taken from the web site):

  • The interactive PRINCE2 CD-ROM course
  • Exercises at Foundation and Practitioner Level
  • Simulated Foundation Exam
  • Cost of PRINCE2 Foundation Exam
  • Cost of PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam
  • Managing Successful Projects in PRINCE2 (The Official PRINCE2 manual)
  • Laminated A3 PRINCE2 Process Model
  • Access to a PRINCE2 Trainer via email or phone
  • 2 Day UK Based Classroom Revision Workshop (cost of overnight stay is not included)

This blended learning course consisting of the self-study preparation and a classroom workshop as preparation for the Practitioner exam suited me well. The e-learning content on the CD (is the same as online) is very well organized and guides the learner step-by-step through the method. The exercises and the exam simulators that are included give an impression of what to expect in the exams though it seemed that the actual exam questions were more difficult despite the fact that original questions were included in the training pack.

The process model designed by the ILX Group is even better than the model found in the official manual. It makes things very clear and gives an excellent overview of all the processes in a PRINCE2 project.

The admin staff of the ILX Group were very supportive in the preparation of getting the materials to me and scheduling a workshop. Due to the ash cloud of the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and thus delays in mail services, my training material took a while to make it over from the UK and I did not have much time for the preparation. Thankfully, I could study throughout the day and did not have to do that besides work. Thus, the time frame of 1.5 weeks turned out to be fine. I was happy to learn that I could also take a workshop in Amsterdam instead of travelling to London thus cutting down a bit on the travel expenses.

My workshop took place in Amsterdam from 10-12 May 2010. We were a small group of 6 people taking this prep course and that was a fantastic size. 4 out of 6 lived in the Netherlands, but only one was Dutch. We were an international group of one each: American, British, Chinese, Dutch, German from Luxembourg, and Turkish from Germany. Our trainer was British with a very extensive PM background and could talk like a waterfall. If he hadn’t done so, we would have needed an additional day. ;-)

Our course schedule looked like that:

  • Monday: 1-hour Foundation exam and organizational issues
  • Tuesday and Wednesday morning and a bit of the afternoon: revision of the PRINCE2 themes and processes with time for questions, elaborations and going through another prep exam
  • Wednesday afternoon: 2.5-hour Practitioner exam

Lots of paper on the tables during the workshop

cc licensed flickr photo shared by 4nitsirk

PRINCE2 and universities

Although I had not worked in a company and had been involved in university projects only, I could relate to the topics that are covered by PRINCE2 very well. That is also supposed to be that way because PRINCE2 is not designed to be industry specific but universal. Of course, the company metaphor is in the foreground, but it can be applied to a university background or any other one as well.

Thus, I wish I had known about PRINCE2 earlier in my career because then I could have avoided some pitfalls in my project management and sometimes done things in a more structured way. Although I must also say that we already did many things “correctly” in “imMEDIAte TEACHing” because PRINCE2 was not developed out of the air, but from real-world examples. Hence, common sense, previous project experience, and obligations from the funding body lead you to a number of the same conclusions that can be found in the method.

However, I think that learning about a project management method should be high on the agenda of professional development for anybody at universities involved in projects. And here I do not just mean big national or EU projects, but also small ones. Everything that is not “business as usual” is a project. During my exam preparations I realized that I had participated in a number of projects over the last 2.5 years at the University of Luxembourg though they had not been labeled as such. Had a PM method been applied, some aspects of the work could have been improved.

At universities, researchers are increasingly involved in projects, but they do not always get appropriate support or know about project management. Learning about a PM method can boost their confidence and make the management part of the projects easier so that they can focus more on the content delivery as that is the main objective of their project work.

As an aside: We also learned that strawberries can make it onto bread in the Netherlands. We have not yet found out whether that is a specialty of Amsterdam or not, but Sia Vogel, one of my former #CCK08 contacts, knows about it.

Sia Vogel about strawberry bread on Twitter

cc licensed flickr photo shared by 4nitsirk

One course times 17

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For the Winter Semester 2009/10 (which already started in mid-September – go figure) it was decided that all students enrolled in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences (BScE – Bachelor en Sciences de l’Education) at the University of Luxembourg use the open source e-portfolio system Mahara for their electronic developmental portfolio. This system had already been in use with about 120 students the previous year in a pilot and now it was to be used for all our 480 something students.

Thus, we organized workshops for the students and their respective tutors. One reason why we had chosen Mahara was its ease of use. Students can create their e-portfolio very quickly without needing to know HTML or web design. They simply upload or create their artefacts online, drag & drop them into their portfolio sections, arrange them, and they are done. The part that should take them the longest is the actual reflection but not the technical side. Although this procedure is not that difficult in general, we offered the students an introductory workshop in which they could touch upon all these things and acquaint themselves with the system because not everyone of them is a tech buff and feels comfortable with any new technology that is thrown at them.

Being the one who had the most knowledge in using Mahara as I had tested it, I kind of became the default workshop facilitator. I also wanted to have these workshops because I knew that not everybody would be thrilled by having to use a new system. Thus, I came up with a plan for a 3-hour introductory workshop for our students in which I repeat the principles of our portfolio approach and then guided them through the collection and creation of artefacts, the process of creating their own portfolios, and how they can share their portfolios with others, receive feedback etc. I knew from the start that this workshop would be very technology-oriented to acquaint the students with the system and not to talk about their already existing portfolios and how they can be brought into Mahara. I missed this part because the workshop stayed rather abstract and disconnected to the portfolio topic in some ways.

But I needed a way of how to familiarize about 480 students with our new portfolio system in a workshop setting taking into account that

  • all students had to participate,
  • the workshop should preferably take place before their first internship period in the 3rd week of October when they would start to work more in their portfolio,
  • the tech savviness of the students ranged from 2 to 10,
  • every student should be able to try things out -> no auditorium-like demonstration,
  • they only get this one session.

The first thing I did was start early. And by early I mean really early – way back in June. We knew that our 4th-year students would have a tough year ahead of them with a longer internship, additional time in their internship classes beyond the internship, and their final project. Thus, we did not want to bring all new stuff in the first few weeks of the semester, but allow them to make themselves familiar with the new tool over the summer break. Those who wanted to take the time to make the move to Mahara over the summer could do so and would not have to cram that into the regular semester schedule.

I had scheduled four workshops in June. Due to the schedule of the students and my own, these workshops ended up on two days within a short time span. The other 13 workshops took place between 18 September 2009 and 16 October 2009, generally three to four per week. Thus, I had a tour through our entire bachelor program from the 1st-year to the 4th-year students seeing 428 students altogether. The ones I did not have in the workshops were students who are spending their semester abroad currently and who had already departed for their new university.

In addition to these student workshops I also gave four workshops for faculty with a different angle to the topic.

Facilitating such a large number of basically identical workshops within a short time was an interesting experience for me. At first I thought I could not tell the same thing to the second or third group that I had already told the first one until I remembered that they knew nothing about the topic and had not been in the workshop of the first group. No workshop turned out like another for several reasons:

  • the students were different
  • I added details right away that I had said in passing earlier
  • I left out details when I realized they were of a minor nature
  • I became more relaxed with time and could open my senses more to what was going on around me
  • I learned to look more closely for hints when students got bored or were struggling

I tried to approach each workshop with a sense of newness because I did not want to come across as having learned my spiel by heart and just reciting everything without being really engaged. I wanted to be excited about the topic 17 times to hopefully also spark some excitement about the capabilities the tool offers in the students. I also wanted to be excited each time to make the workshop interesting to me and to not get bored myself. In the course of the workshop I also learned a few new things about Mahara because students approached the software differently and thus found other ways of coming up with the answer to a question.

Of course, I did my share of comparisons, but they also helped me. After the first three workshops in September, I realized that I kept stretching the introductory part more and more by adding not unimportant details that I had only thrown in earlier in passing thus making this a really long part where the students were basically passive. Later I tried to avoid rambling and ultimately had more time for the practice parts. In some workshops I could get on much faster than in others, some student groups had lots of questions whereas in others I had to provide the questions and answer them.

During the workshop, I did not use any handouts because I wanted them to explore the system’s features without being glued to a piece of paper and to realize that many things followed the same procedure (like give it a title, provide a description / text, tag it, save it, click a radio button to put it into a portfolio section). However, I did make a quick start guide for Mahara which can be extended over time to include solutions to questions the students had / will have. This guide is housed on our ICT support web site that is openly accessible.

There was one moment in every single workshop which was the same, when I told the students they would need a new password for Mahara. There was always a very audible “Oh no. Why another password?” However, this moment when the mood of the students plummeted to zero lasted only a short time because I could lift their mood by explaining that they did not need to remember that password. Mahara allows for networking with Moodle. Thus, when students log in to Moodle, they are immediately logged in to Mahara. To set up this connection to their Moodle accounts, they do need to provide a new password for Mahara. But as they can always log in via Moodle, they don’t need to remember it. Complicated and simple at the same time.

This workshop was an additional seminar for students in their 2nd, 3rd and 4th year. We integrated it into a regular seminar for the 1st-year students as they start out new with the portfolio. They have a seminar dedicated to everything portfolio during the 1st and 2nd semester. In the 2nd semester, there will be a hybrid seminar combining content discussions with discussions of how Mahara can be used for achieving what they want to do in their portfolio.

I am looking forward to hearing the reactions of the students towards the end of the semester when they will have had time to use Mahara and integrate it into their study work flow.