Supporting & Sustaining Communities of Excellence
Staff development and reward mechanisms are central to RLO-CETL's mission to create, share, use and evaluate high quality e-learning resources. Practitioner workshops, formulated to engage participants in hands-on content creation activities, 'kick-start' the process and form a gentle introduction to the more technical aspects of learning objects and learning design. As the community's knowledge base deepens, the workshops become more complex to incorporate advanced learning design and generative learning object tools and templates. Self-sustaining communities are the ultimate goal, ones that can take control of their own teaching and learning and have the requisite skills to create, adapt and repurpose quality materials. The main function of the CETL is to furnish its communities with the knowledge and tools to achieve this.
All the tools and templates used to facilitate these activities are both freely available and modifiable. Applicants are not only encouraged to make full use of the existing materials in their proposals but also to define and create new tools, templates and methods where appropriate so that the tool-kit can be expanded and enhanced.
The CETL also exists to build bridges between practitioners from different disciplines and with different perspectives, notably between the academics who teach and the IT experts who develop the tools; clearly there is a need for them to work together harmoniously. A sense of belonging to a community can ease this process and proposals seeking to dissolve barriers and support multidisciplinary team-working to ensure effective e-learning is achieved and mutual understanding is improved are welcomed. Communities may be sustained by many mechanisms, both telematic and face-to-face and proposals that explore effective methods of communication for community cohesion, locally, nationally and globally, are also welcomed.
