2.2 Working within the Community of Practice (CoP)

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: • 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*).

Figure 1: A CoP Slack interaction

2.2.2 Zoom

In addition to the continuous interactions on the Slack platform, there were periodic Zoom sessions for the whole CoP where specific areas were discussed: 1. Zoom for larger groups 2. Working with mixed competence groups 3. Using WhatsApp 4. Creating sustainability 5. Asynchronous tasks 6. Maintaining CP engagement (strategies/ETA role, etc.) 7. Monitoring and Evaluation: When and how 8. Monitoring and Evaluation: Stakeholders and tools These topics were identified by analysing the Slack channels and were ‘a huge support happening at just the right time to focus on the relevant issues’ (NCG). This ‘excellent forum for discussion and sharing of ideas especially when working in smaller groups’ (ARU) was supported by a system of using shared Google Docs, which allowed the discussions in the breakout rooms to be minuted by the CoP members to create synchronously co-constructed records of questions and suggestions for later reference. This proved an effective strategy, not only for ideas generation and awareness raising (‘the online discussion sessions (and resulting documents) were very useful generating lots of ideas and also raising considerations that I, certainly, had not thought of before’ (CELT)), but also for creating a sense of shared experience that ‘is highly beneficial in building the community and trust required for online collaboration on a complex and potentially stressful project such as PRELIM’ (IH Bristol).

Essentially, the members of the CoP were free to use of the support of the community as they felt appropriate – ‘sometimes it was simple reassurance as regards timeframes which was valuable, other times it was direct advice from a provider in a similar situation, or as simple as sharing a document template’ (WSE); sometimes it was ‘satisfying curiosity as to what was happening elsewhere around the world’ (IH London). Whatever the need brought to the CoP, it’s probably true to say ‘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).