2.2 Working within the CoP
2.2.1 Slack
The community of practice (CoP) was a forum of peer support for the UK providers. Managed and facilitated by NILE, it used the Slack platform for PRELIM communications, Google Docs for information storage and Zoom for group meetings. It had three main purposes: •
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PRELIM information sharing: ‘pathways for fulfilling project and regulatory requirements, such as reporting and participation agreements, in the form of template documents, reminders and strategy suggestions’ (IH Bristol) Forums for sharing good practice: ‘the CoP in fact provided an opportunity to collaborate and share ideas in regular and meaningful ways’ (Lewis School) Collegial support: ‘There was a definite sense of community … and members seemed to feel that they were supported or felt they had the opportunity to seek support from other members’ (NCG) ‘It was helpful to understand how each project was proceeding, and what considerations, priorities and expectations had been laid out by all parties’ (CES)
Most communication was conducted on the Slack platform, which provided a means of communication within the group, via threads that could be categorised into channels for the different aspects of the project, e.g. #evaluation, #project management, #course design, etc. As illustrated in Figure 1, the peer support was highly responsive, and the individual reports identify numerous examples of practical strategies and activities that came from this forum. Of course, levels of engagement varied during the project process. They were at their highest during initial context research and course design stages, lower during the initial period of course delivery, and picked up again when evaluation stages began. For the PRELIM project as a whole the Slack platform provided an invaluable means of internal communications. It became a channel for questions and responses between the project sponsors and the country project partners, and allowed the NILE project management team to mediate and share information as the need arose. These interactions had a tangible impact on project outcomes and ‘the partnerships formed within the CoP, predominantly through the regular meetings held, helped to shape the course into something greater than its initial content’ (LILA*).
Partnered Remote Language Improvement (PRELIM) project report
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