I had a collaboration planned with the Milan Fashion Institute (MFI) on the 11th March. This was between students at MA Fashion Design Management at LCF and MA Sustainability Product Management at MFI. The seminar day involved insights from industry partners too. I hadn’t initially planned to host this session, so I hadn’t given much thought to the technical and logistic part of this hybrid session. The FDM students, industry partners and my colleague and I were online separately, and the MFI students were in class. MFI does not use Teams, which we realised was a problem in our test the day before the session as it made it more challenging for them to access the same interface as we see at LCF.
I realised that I had to take ownership of setting up the session despite not feeling completely confident to do it. I was keen to ensure as smooth as possible running of this day, having the experience of my microteaching session not going to plan fresh in my memory! It was a reminder of the importance of preparation, in particular for an ‘out of the ordinary’ type of session. I took a belt and braces approach to the set up and ensured that the same information was available several places and that I had one document gathered with all links and info for the different student groups and Miro boards – ready to post in the chat. I knew that the MFI students would be likely to encounter access issues.
I sat up the mixed MFI x LCF groups, so we didn’t have to manage that on the day. This was done as Teams group channels so that we could easily engage with the groups and have an overview of their engagement inspired by the practice of a colleague at FBS, who has experiemented with this the last couple of years. The students could store their research here too and find their links to the Miro board.
Reflections
- The preparation of your session and thinking about potential challenges are crucial. This is even more important with hybrid sessions as sound, the platform, participants digital skills might throw you a curveball.
- I couldn’t have hosted the session without the document with all the links gathered. I will ensure that this type of preparation is in place if I am involved in this type of online collaboration again.
- The session went well and I received positive feedback for the set up. This highlights the importance of preparing for the technical aspect/challenges of your session.
- The Miro boards worked well as a collaborative tool for capturing the discussions between MFI and LCF students.
- Next time, I would ensure that a technician/digital learning team member would be involved at an earlier stage to set everything up together with me.