MM Personal Development Plan.rtf

H808 PDP: Madeleine McGrath

	Overview
	I am currently leading a team who are running a 5 week Distance Learning Programme for consultants to train them in the use of my company’s Organisation Development model. Successful consultants will be granted a license to use this product with their own clients. The programme has been developed in the light of my experience of designing and facilitating an online module as part of my H804 studies, and following my occasional use of webinar technology to make presentations to dispersed audiences. I plan to use the experience of running this programme to develop my skills as an e-learning professional. I judge the following skill areas to be the most promising places to make improvements.
	Skills and Competences	Existing competence level		Improvement Actions/Goals
1.	Awareness of Students and their learning needs	Memo: this was an area that was judged lacking in my H804 EC.
1a	Understanding of students’ knowledge base	The current process uncovers the students knowledge base from student cvs and registration documents		Experiment with ways systematically to find out the existing levels of knowledge of my learners in future programmes.
1b	Knowledge of students and their backgrounds	The registration process asks questions about the professional, academic and personal backgrounds of learners		The existing process will be reviewed, and more searching questions included in future if necessary.
1c	Awareness of individual and special needs	This information is currently derived from the current registration process.		Identify specific learning needs based on findings from 1a and 1b, and the experience of the first programme. Introduce a more searching inquiry process if necessary.
2	Creating the right online atmosphere
2a	Use of voice and gesture	We currently have both voice and online communication with learners.		Monitor the online/telephone responses of learners to my and my colleagues inputs.
2b	Ability to include all students in discussion	The telephone conference format makes it difficult to ensure everyone can participate. A number of strategies to support this have been introduced on this programme. The success of these strategies will be reviewed at the end of the programme.		Monitor participation of learners in telephone and online conferences, and investigate any disappointing participation levels. Identify strategies to encourage optimum participation in the learner’s circumstances.
2c	Ability to create a suitable atmosphere in groups	The various learning arenas (blogsite, webinar, Linkedin) I have chosen give my colleagues and I a variety of ways of judging whether we have been able to generate a group dynamic.		I will monitor participation in group sessions/arenas, to decide on any improvements for future events. The long term test of success in this factor will be whether learners choose to remain active members of our online community after the end of the programme.
3	Generating stickability	Memo: this was an aspect of my H804 project that I found most disappointing.
3a	Ability to engage students	Persistence levels of learners have been variable in past programmes of mine – from not even participating though to erratic, unreliable participation up to enthusiastic and energetic participation. Participation is important to this programme, as it gives us visibility of learners who will be representing our products in the market place and assists in our assessment of their capabilities.		Though observing any differences in participation levels of learners, identify the factors that do/will motivate learners to participate in our programme, and incorporate as many as possible into future programmes.
4	Ability to use IT appropriately
4a	Understanding of online course design: how to write online teaching material, how to design online activities, how to transform teaching or training material for the online environment.	Our current programme has a blog, an audio webinar platform, participant guide book and a mentored assignment as its learning methodology.		In order to turn this programme into one that can deliver high quality training to larger numbers of geographically dispersed students, it is vital that our basic programme includes a much greater proportion of asynchronous activities. The experience of the first programme will provide insights into the activities and discussions that are essential in our learning process. This learning can be incorporated into the next design of the programme. The fact that we have chosen technologies for the first programme which give us visibility of the process learners are going through will provide valuable insights into the actual learning process that is taking place.
4b	Experience of audio and visual facilities of the web; for example, Netmeeting, Skype, digital photos, webcasting, podcasting	The current programme uses webcasting (which is called webinar in my field).		In future programmes, I envisage much greater use of podcasts to replace some of the webinar inputs, and will be very interested to experiment with the use of Skype and its video conferencing capabilities.
4c	Understanding of the different text-based communication systems: computer conferencing, bulletin boards, listserves etc	The current programme uses a webinar platform for synchronous communication and a blogsite for asynchronous communication.		It is my aim to migrate the programme gradually to incorporate a greater proportion of asynchronous communication. This will make the programme more time efficient for tutors and learners, and will give us much greater scalability of numbers of learners.
4d	Skill in developing online community: what works and what doesn’t; providing focus, animating online groups, developing collaborative activities	We are using two online community platforms; blogger and linkedin..		Monitoring the community dynamics of the first programme will give us data to assess our community building capabilities and identify areas for improvement. The ultimate test of this competence will be the extent to which learners stay active in this learning community after the programme has finished.
5	Student Assessment
5a	Ability to mark to the department’s standards	No previous experience	This is the first programme that we have developed in this field. I will work with colleagues, and research best academic practice to establish the criteria against which we will judge the performance of our learners.
5b	Consistency and reliability in marking standards	No previous experience.	I will engage my colleagues in the assessment process, which will give me a benchmark to judge my own assessment competences.
5c	Written feedback on assignments	At present I am not required to provide written feedback to learners. This programme will therefore provide my first experience of this.	The experience of providing feedback for the first time will be a valuable learning experience for me. I shall reflect on that experience and ask for feedback from colleagues to help me to hone my skills in this area.
6a	Steps taken to improve your teaching	This programme was created based on my previous H80X experience and in particular the experience of designing and facilitating three online modules in H804.	The items in this Action/Goals column provide a template against which I will develop my e-learning skills for the future.
7	Organisation and record-keeping	Since this has been a prototype programme, the documents and records have been created using our best instincts and prior experience, which is largely of face to face training.	In the light of our experience, I will analyse the documents and course materials that we have used, and streamline their use and storage.
8	Collaboration with teaching colleagues	On the programme to date, my colleagues have collaborated in supporting the delivery of my course design, although this has largely been rather passive collaboration.	I will involve colleagues in the end of programme review, and encourage them to take part in the design of future programmes. This will improve the quality of future programmes, and will increase their ownership of the programme in the future.

Adapted from Source: H851 Practice Guide 7, Reviewing and Improving your Teaching, The Open University, 1998, p.31. and Technology related skills and competences for e-learning professionals, Robin Mason.