1 Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University. Denmark
9. Conclusions and ideas for further work
We have engaged with a DBR project that aims to change and extend the CoP’s among supervisors of PBL projects in the degree programmes at Aalborg University. The PBL Exchange platform itself is a potential new infrastructure for communication within and between existing CoP’s for PBL project supervisors, but making this become reality is an ongoing challenge.
Dorina Gnaur and Hans Hüttel
The theoretical contribution of our project relates to new ways of consolidating CoP’s through crowdsourcing and through understanding how they work. In our direct interactions with existing CoP’s within departments we have captured diverse perspectives regarding the need for a question-based, readily accessible online CoP.
Senior PBL practitioners often see existing CoP’s as fully satisfactory ways of providing informal professional exchanges and practice development; whereas younger staff members are visibly more open and express a need for such a forum. One has to thread carefully the terrains of various CoP’s and create incentives for members of diverse motivations to participate. The challenge and bounty experiences should be seen in this light. Challenges can nudge more experienced PBL practitioners to participate by discussing core aspects and potentially developmental aspects of PBL. Bounties can empower other members of the emerging community to advance issues of importance to their personally defined learning.
DBR offers many ways to cross the boundaries between educational design experiments and theory development, with the relative drawbacks of partiality with regard to both. This translates in our case to PBL Exchange being mainly a project intervention, designed and advanced by the project team, which corresponds to the DBR critique of lab-like interventions. The way to circumvent this limitation is by frequent interactions with the field and the gathering of significant feedback to integrate in further design iterations, which was very much our strategy. Regarding the theory development, we subscribe to the partial character of findings as generated by an ongoing design process. However, we are able to contribute some preliminary findings with regard to the necessity to focus explicitly on community building: This can support PBL-related exchanges as part of an online forum for CPD. In this regard it is essential to consider the notion of CoP and the ongoing informal learning and development as part of everyday work. CoP- based approaches to learning stress the need to orchestrate ‘thinking-together’ processes, and here we find an online medium, which is socially facilitative in nature, such as crowdsourcing, that can be a vehicle for these processes. However, careful attention needs to be paid to extending existing CoP’s to a larger online CoP. These considerations have in our case led to the design of further technology enhancers to address the orientations of both experienced and newcomers to the practice of PBL.
We are going to incorporate the informal communities more systematically and investigate how this approach should be carried out in order to use PBL Exchange to extend the community. While contact with local communities in the form of information activities directed at the departmental level is still part of our efforts, a longer-term strategy is to create a group of dedicated users that can be explicitly nursed and become a permanent core of the community. Here, it will be important to identify key members of these informal communities and get them interested in participating in this resilient core. The outcome of our further efforts will contribute to a concrete, evidence-based strategy for building new communities around existing, informal ones.
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