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livSo. Um. This is now public: my employers just won a major grant to help train the whole world in Covid sequencing and analysis, to the same high standard that the UK's Covid Genomics Consortium (COG-UK) have achieved. For the next two years, I'm the education specialist in a massive cross-institutional team trying to save the world from the pandemic.
I've been in post a year and a half. What I was employed to do was run a nice little programme creating 2-3 specialist MOOCs a year. Half a year in the pandemic hit, and I was able to continue running my online courses programme while working from home. Well, to be fair it's not so little, the Massive nature of MOOCs means that we are training tens of thousands of people each year and numbers shot up when most of the world was in lockdown.
And now this. One of the questions asked when we were applying for this money was, just what is the upper limit on these online courses? What if we get hundreds of thousands at the same time? Millions? I was able to confidently say that FutureLearn is really scalable, both technically and in terms of how the education works. But there was certainly a moment of vertigo when one of the foremost genomics experts in the world was asking me, what if millions of people all want to learn your stuff?
The way this works is that I'm not actually going to be personally training hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. I'm managing a team of specialists who are actually going to create the courses. The content is going to be provided by specialist researchers whose full time job will be to find out and document what COG-UK are doing and what information needs to be passed on to all the sequencing labs and healthcare systems in other countries. My colleagues are going to be running more targeted courses, for hundreds or thousands of people learning in parallel across each of the three continents (this is the 'remote classrooms model' described in the press release).
In terms of my day-to-day life I'm going to shift, in the next couple of months, from managing one person to heading a team. I've so far had the easiest introduction to management I could have had, since my report is just unreasonably brilliant and hard-working and supportive, and my biggest problem has been making sure she gets recognition for how fantastic she is. Now I'm going to be directly line managing a second education developer, an administrator (and an education technologist who is actually from a different new project). And coordinating my team with this huge consortium of Covid experts and global thought leaders. In order to run a project of the utmost significance: we're developing training to address a literally existential threat.
I think I have some emotions about this, but I'm not quite sure how to describe what they are.
I've been in post a year and a half. What I was employed to do was run a nice little programme creating 2-3 specialist MOOCs a year. Half a year in the pandemic hit, and I was able to continue running my online courses programme while working from home. Well, to be fair it's not so little, the Massive nature of MOOCs means that we are training tens of thousands of people each year and numbers shot up when most of the world was in lockdown.
And now this. One of the questions asked when we were applying for this money was, just what is the upper limit on these online courses? What if we get hundreds of thousands at the same time? Millions? I was able to confidently say that FutureLearn is really scalable, both technically and in terms of how the education works. But there was certainly a moment of vertigo when one of the foremost genomics experts in the world was asking me, what if millions of people all want to learn your stuff?
The way this works is that I'm not actually going to be personally training hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. I'm managing a team of specialists who are actually going to create the courses. The content is going to be provided by specialist researchers whose full time job will be to find out and document what COG-UK are doing and what information needs to be passed on to all the sequencing labs and healthcare systems in other countries. My colleagues are going to be running more targeted courses, for hundreds or thousands of people learning in parallel across each of the three continents (this is the 'remote classrooms model' described in the press release).
In terms of my day-to-day life I'm going to shift, in the next couple of months, from managing one person to heading a team. I've so far had the easiest introduction to management I could have had, since my report is just unreasonably brilliant and hard-working and supportive, and my biggest problem has been making sure she gets recognition for how fantastic she is. Now I'm going to be directly line managing a second education developer, an administrator (and an education technologist who is actually from a different new project). And coordinating my team with this huge consortium of Covid experts and global thought leaders. In order to run a project of the utmost significance: we're developing training to address a literally existential threat.
I think I have some emotions about this, but I'm not quite sure how to describe what they are.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-21 08:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2021-06-21 09:13 pm (UTC)I am so glad you are involved in this.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-21 09:23 pm (UTC)I am impressed, and hope your part of it goes smoothly.
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Date: 2021-06-22 06:23 am (UTC)Wow! I'm so glad this is happening and that you're part of making it happen :-)
(no subject)
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Date: 2021-06-22 04:25 pm (UTC)If you do get any chances to do professional development courses, I suggest you take them, even if you end up using them as What Not To Do Manuals.
Bear in mind that the bar for line management is shockingly low. Just abiding by the law puts you into the top 3rd of line managers, easily.
As for the team co-ordination aspect, I've been Scrum Master for a team for a while, on a big international project (though obviously we're not dealing with an existential threat). If you want to chat at some point, let me know.
(no subject)
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Date: 2021-06-23 10:53 am (UTC)Where there's MOOC there's brass
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