Training the Trainer – OER Mentorship Programme

CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY

Technical friction with Google Sites was constant, participants struggled with page structure, navigation and uploading, which sometimes crowded out the OER content itself. Licensing remained a genuine source of uncertainty throughout, especially around student-authored work and share-alike terms. AI-generated outputs were often context-inappropriate, incorrect language, foreign flags, malformed images, which created a real risk of confusing learners if used uncritically. The digital divide, and limited time between sessions also meant some participants struggled to consolidate learning from one session to the next.

ADVICE FOR TEACHER EDUCATORS

• Let yourself learn from seeing a real example of AI output go wrong, it teaches evaluation better than any guideline.
• Sit with licensing early. That uncertainty resurfaces and pulls attention from the actual teaching work.
• Don't expect one exposure to stick. Build in your own repetition and reflection rather than assuming it consolidates on its own.

IMPACT BEYOND THE ACTIVITY

Each participant's growing e-portfolio is becoming a live record of how OER and open pedagogy are being translated into their own divisions, geography, IT methodology, instructional design and beyond, well past the training room itself. The peer dialogue that formed organically during sessions signals the early emergence of a community of practice around open resources within the School of Education, exactly the kind of sustained, shared identity the programme set out to build. Facilitator-demonstrated adaptations, such as the re-themed, relicensed photosynthesis resource, now exist as reusable models that other lecturers can draw on.

KEY LESSONS

I discovered that starting from a real failure, such as the AI-generated geography poster that looked polished but turned out to be factually inaccurate, taught participants more about evaluation, bias and contextual fit than any abstract principle could. It gave the whole group a shared, concrete reason to care about their outputs, and produced the line that captured the programme's own conclusion better than anything I could have imposed on it, you can never get rid of the teacher.

I was surprised by how quickly rich, experience-led peer dialogue formed, participants mapped ideas onto their own courses unprompted and began troubleshooting each other's technical struggles without being asked. The most important lesson was that skill consolidation cannot be assumed between sessions, the recall gap we saw in Session 2 showed that reflection routines and repetition matter as much as new content. If I started again, I would build in a dedicated, hands-on licensing and uploading session earlier, since that uncertainty kept resurfacing and diverting attention from the pedagogical content each time.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The teacher's judgement remains central, technology adapts resources, it does not replace evaluation.
• Community of practice forms fastest around shared, lived teaching experience, not imposed theory.
• Skills need sustained scaffolding across sessions; one exposure is not enough for lasting practice change.