The aim of this project is to create a platform that strengthens the Science Faculty teachers’ community by visualizing ongoing initiatives, facilitating exchange of good practices, scholarly insights and calls for collaboration across the different departments. At the end of this project we will have a report documenting the needs and barriers, and teacher experiences from pilot experiments, with respect to information provision, exchange of good practices and dissemination of educational projects among the teaching staff at the Faculty of Science. With these results, we will outline what means of communication and type of platform, and their necessary requirements, would be desirable for creating and maintaining a vivid teacher community, and formulate an action plan on how to structurally embed the effective approaches from our pilots and make them available to the whole teacher community.

Background

Teachers feel lost in the jungle of different information resources (e.g. education domain of intranet, departmental MS Teams environments). They have needs for both formal and informal information, and timely (dynamic) and
structural information. Several of such needs are currently covered by ongoing initiatives, like the intranet, but are often not experienced as structured and interactive, or are even not found by teachers. This problem is even more pronounced among new teachers and hampers the ‘onboarding’ of our growing teaching staff. It is currently not clear what barriers prevent teachers from gaining access to relevant information and exchanging insights within the teacher community. Research on so-called Communities of Practice (CoPs), a network of individuals who share experience and passion and may share news of professional interest, and learn together, would be a very effective approach to facilitate exchange and, subsequently, strengthen the teacher community. Integrating the initiatives and activities that already take place within our teacher community in a CoP would be a very effective approach to facilitate exchange and, subsequently, strengthen the teacher community.

Project and aims

This project aims to enhance Science Faculty teachers’ community by improving information access and collaboration. To create a platform that strengthens the Science Faculty teachers’ community by visualizing ongoing initiatives, facilitating exchange of good practices, scholarly insights and calls for collaboration across the different departments.

We will first investigate what needs and barriers are experienced by teachers throughout the faculty with respect to getting access to information, getting connected to ongoing educational initiatives, and exchanging information within the teacher community; and investigate what the requirements for such a platform would be. Next, based on the outcome of this investigation we will run several pilots to experiment with different platforms that support both structural and dynamic information exchange within the teacher community and evaluate how these platforms are experienced by a representative teacher test panel.

Results