KIC and the four other education/training entities in the ADUHC holding group (KTS, ADU, Knowledge Group) took part in a group-level Workshop as part of the E-Learning and Digitization Project, which is supporting the development of the entities’ online delivery of programs and courses.
The Project started early in 2019-20 and clearly, its importance became all the more significant with the onset of the global pandemic part-way through the Spring Semester.
The Project is being supported by the ADUHC Project Office and two external educational technology consultants and following a seven-stage process. The first stage, now concluded, was to conduct self-assessments of each entity to inform decisions on the overall direction that the group wants to take regarding its e-learning strategy for the next five years.
On Tuesday 8 February, representatives of each entity together with the ADUHC Chairman, Dr Ali Al Dhaheri, attended a Vision and Mission Workshop for the second stage activity: to determine the unified group-level Vision for e-learning and the entity-level e-learning missions.
The Workshop was a highly-participative and engaging four-hour online session, with group discussions, quizzes and break-out sessions. The Workshop was run by Dr Chris Gentile, one of the Project consultants, using Zoom to allow the maximum use of interactive presentations which included polls, live results charts, quizzes, and engaging Q&A sessions. For interested colleagues, the presentations were created in AhaSlides.
During the Workshop, whole-group and break-out sessions covered overview of strategic planning process the for e-learning project; a discussion on vision and mission setting (looking at good examples such as Tesla and Amazon and why theirs work); key elements of vision and mission statements and how they differ (see below); and a discussion of the results of a recent survey on e-learning and its importance for each entity and for the group.
By the end of the Workshop, e-learning missions had been developed for each entity and a group-level e-learning Vision had been agreed (which sits under the main group Vision). For the next stage, there will be cascading activities within each entity and strategic goal development sessions.
Feedback during and after the Workshop indicated that it had been highly successful. All entity representatives had devised suitable mission statements for sharing within their own organization and the participants had experienced an engaging and enjoyable online workshop which provided an excellent example of the high-quality online learning activities that the group wishes to promote and extend to all our learners.