Collaboration, Creation, and Community: A Virtual Community of Practice for Teacher Educators
Abstract: Instructors who work at large universities or in distance learning programs often have limited face-to-face contact with one another leading to fewer collaboration and co-learning opportunities. A lack of consistent interaction can make designing and refining new curriculum particularly difficult. To address this problem, we created an instructor workspace in the collaboration management program Slack as part of the implementation of a new technology literacy course for incoming freshman education majors. We found our Slack community served as an online community of practice where instructors shared information, re-mixed assignments and resources, asked questions, and refined the design of the course. In this presentation, we will explore how the online community of practice supported instructors as they collaborated to refine and implement a new technology course. We will also discuss the affordances of the software that enabled the collaboration.