It takes a village to raise this child
If you’re lucky enough to have one individual at your institution who is responsible for staff development, and if this person is lucky enough to be able to devote 100% of his/her time to developing and implementing a Learning 2.0 programme, then you probably don’t need a “village” to get this thing of the ground and running! We had no such individual, so L2@Mac was put together and run under the auspices of the Emerging Technologies Group (which I chair). While we borrowed from PLCMC’s excellent programme, we added a lot of our own content too, so it was nice to be able to spread that work around the committee members. Also, ETG members served as “Team Leaders” for L2@Mac participants (more on that later) which is something we would not have been able to do if we didn’t have a committee to start with! (A word of advice on the size of the group: there are 5 of us in ETG and we’ve found that to be the perfect number — enough to spread the work around, but not too many that booking meetings and getting things done becomes a problem.)

Leave yourself plenty of time to plan
We started talking about doing L2@Mac in August 2006. We launched in February 2007. While I can’t say that we devoted tons of time to planning in the early months (we really got down to it in November 2006), I will say that it took A LOT of time and energy to get where we needed to get to by launch date. Also, we launched the programme with a guest speaker (only the best: Michael Stephens!) and planning that event alone took a considerable amount of time.

Launch. Wait. Begin.
Our official launch was on February 1st but the programme didn’t begin until February 12th. At first we worried that staff enthusiasm might wane if we didn’t begin the programme right after the launch (Michael did a tremendous job of rallying the troops and we wanted to take advantage of that enthusiasm!), but in retrospect, I think those extra days were a good idea — it gave our staff time to think about what they were getting into (!) and I think we had more sign-ups because of it.

There is no perfect time to run the programme
If you’re at an academic institution, you probably understand where I’m coming from. We thought long & hard about when to do it: we ruled out the fall because, well, it’s THE FALL — the beginning of a new school year and our busiest term! While the summer might have seemed an obvious choice, we ruled it out on account of too many people being away during the summer and therefore missing out on a lot of what we had planned. So we settled on the winter term. Some of our participants (especially public service staff) told us that they were still too busy to do justice to the programme, but they also acknowledged that there is no perfect time, so they plugged along (bless them!). If I were to do it over, I might choose to do it between April and June (again, not perfect, but maybe a bit better than right during term).

Don’t reinvent the wheel
Obviously we modeled our programme on the one Helene built at PLCMC. We changed a few things and added some modules, but it was so great to be able to draw from an already successful programme and learn from their experience. Helene had the foresight and generosity to license her content under Creative Commons, so there is a huge number of institutions that have done/are doing their own versions of the programme. So there literally is no reason at all to reinvent the wheel!

Not everyone is self-directed and not everyone learns the same way
One of the reasons I was drawn to Helene’s idea was that it was a completely self-directed programme — learners interacted with the content on their own, they worked on the activities in a self-directed way, and they took responsibility for their own learning. All good things. However, I knew early on that an entirely online programme would not work for our staff. I also knew that since our staff are all located in close proximity, we could definitely use that to our advantage. So we did two things:

1. we organized all participants into “learning groups” & assigned each group a team leader (a member of ETG);
2. we held drop-in sessions in our teaching lab to give staff the opportunity to leave their desks for an hour, come to the lab to work on the activities for the week, ask questions, and get help from their peers.

We started the drop-in sessions during a 2 week break we had right in the middle of the programme, and they were so well received that we decided to hold at least a couple of drop-ins a week until the end of the programme.

Give participants time to catch up
That 2-week break in the middle of the programme was essential. Initially we scheduled one week (again, not wanting enthusiasm to wane), but we changed it to 2 weeks when we realized that some participants were stressing out over not getting the activities done. Everyone really appreciated the 2 weeks off and most participants caught up as a result of the break. We also had 2 weeks of “play time” scheduled at the end of the programme, which ended up being “catch-up time” for many, without which we would have had far fewer participants complete the programme.

Find a content balance
I’m not sure how to go about doing this but the lesson here is that it’s important to NOT try to do too much with this programme because that will just stress out your participants (especially the less tech-inclined). But, at the same time, I think it’s important to build enough into the programme to keep people interested and engaged, especially those who are ahead of the pack in terms of using emerging technologies. How to reach this balance? I think 2 things helped us get there:

1. we kept our minimum requirements low and non-threatening;
2. we offered “enrichment” exercises and further reading options for those who were coasting through.

I think there was probably more we could have done to keep things interesting for those who were already comfortable with the technologies — such as giving them a “guest blogging” role on the L2@Mac blog to share their knowledge and enthusiasm, for example.

Enticements are…enticing!
While I’d like to think that so many of our staff members would have signed up EVEN IF we didn’t promise them an MP3 player at the end of the programme (and a chance to win a laptop), the truth is that we probably would have had fewer sign-ups and completions! So, yes, enticements are a good thing.

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Whew, sorry for the length! I might add to this post if I come up with anything else, but this pretty much it for now. If you’ve read this far (!), chances are that you’re planning a Learning 2.0 programme yourself, so feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about what I’ve said here or about our programme in general!

I probably don’t have to give you too much background on the whole “learning 2.0″ thing since it got quite a bit of blog coverage last year, but I will say a hearty thank you to Helene Blowers for putting together a truly brilliant programme and allowing the rest of us steal it shamelessly! That’s exactly what we’ve done at McMaster – the Emerging Technologies Group borrowed a lot from PLCMC’s 23 Things, added a few of our own, and formulated a 12-week programme of hands-on, immersive, self-directed exploration & discovery! We kick off on February 12th (next week!) and I just know it’s going to be all kinds of fun!

The best part? It’s been 4 days since the launch and we already have 53 participants signed up (that’s close to half our total staff!). If you’re interested in keeping up with the progress of the programme, keep your eye on our blog. And feel free to follow along!

I furiously took as many notes as I could during Helene’s session because this is something I’d love to do at my library! Here are some of Helene’s “lessons learned”:

• Build the programme for late bloomers: don’t expect everyone to jump on board from the get-go, so make sure the programme can accomodate those who want to get in on the fun later!
• Allow participants to blog anonymously.
• Communicate weekly using 1.0 methods: Helene sent emails to the participants every Monday and Friday. Makes sense because not everyone will be comfortable with RSS (and blog feeds) early on.
• Focus on discovery and encourage challenges: Helene recommends making the exercises easy enough for everyone but with enough of a built-in challenge for those who want to take things further. This will also encourage staff to use each other as resources and work through the exercises together.
• Remember that it’s not about acceptance and doing it right, it’s about exposure. Not everyone will love every tool they experiment with and that’s OK. Learning 2.0 is about exposing the participants to the tools and technology, it’s not about making them love all those tools!
• Give your staff permission and time to play: the programme would simply fall apart without both!