Leveraging the Strengths of University of California Campus Communities to Reach More Learners Through Open Education

This presentation will discuss the development, implementation, and value of a cross-University of California campus workshop model that breaks down institutional silos and increases open education training for both instructors and learners. During the Fall 2020 Quarter, a team of instructors consisting of librarians, staff, and researchers from UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles, and UC Berkeley, planned and taught a virtual suite of foundational computational programming workshops over the course of three weeks to a diverse group of learners from all three UC campuses. This remote, distributed open educational workshop approach combined and leveraged the instructional strengths of each campus to reach significantly more learners while using less staff time than would be possible with individual, campus-focused workshops. This approach to online instruction also enabled the team of instructors to teach to a scale that maximized enrollment by allowing everyone waitlisted for the workshop to attend through expanded enrollment and concurrent sessions without sacrificing an instructor/helper-to-student ratio. From a pedagogical perspective, this model was particularly effective for teaching technical topics to a large group of novice learners, and given the success of this initial collaborative UC workshop, we are planning a second iteration of this workshop series for the beginning of the 2021 Fall quarter/semester that will include additional UC campuses. Ultimately, our goal is to turn this online collaborative workshop model into an effective and efficient instructional template that could potentially be used by not just the UC system, but by all institutions that may need to collaborate with others to meet the computational research training needs for their various communities