hallam - nscaa adoc project report · 2015. 1. 21. · ! 6!! theoretical!framework:!!...
TRANSCRIPT
NSCAA Advanced DOC Certificate Final Project Report
presented by Nick Hallam
CHOSEN PROJECT:
To create a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to enhance the opportunity for consistent and relevant coaching education and development for the coaching staff at Lonestar SC San Antonio.
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Table of Contents
Problem Statement ................................................................................................................. 3
Mission Statement................................................................................................................... 4
Desired Outcomes ................................................................................................................... 5
Theoretical Framework ........................................................................................................ 6
INPUTS ........................................................................................................................................ 7
Why Google+ ............................................................................................................................. 8
OUTPUTS .................................................................................................................................... 9
Google+ Community – LSSA Staff – ‘Virtual Clubhouse’ ............................................10
iPad screenshot of ‘Virtual Clubhouse’ ..........................................................................11
iPhone screenshot of ‘Virtual Clubhouse’ .....................................................................12
Participation Inclusion........................................................................................................13
Assignments ............................................................................................................................14
Assignment #1........................................................................................................................15
Assignment #1 – Response Sample .................................................................................16
Assignment #1 - Review......................................................................................................17
Future Topic Survey .............................................................................................................18
Survey Results ........................................................................................................................19
Assignment #2........................................................................................................................20
Assignment Overview ..........................................................................................................21
Assignment Response Statistics .......................................................................................22
Assignment #5........................................................................................................................23
Assignment #5 – Response Sample .................................................................................24
Variety of Content .................................................................................................................25
Final Evaluation of Responses ..........................................................................................26
Plans for Sustainability .......................................................................................................28
Appendix?? ..............................................................................................................................29
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Problem Statement: The NSCAA Advanced Director of Coaching Certificate asked me to evaluate my current youth soccer club and identify a subject to positively impact the future direction and performance of the program. The outcome of this evaluation would become my Project for the course that I would undertake and then present the outcomes good or bad for my final presentation in Philadelphia at the 2015 NSCAA Convention. After some deliberation I settled on the coaching education programming at the club as my area of focus. Why? Since arriving at the club in the summer of 2012, I have had trouble executing a coaching education program due to the limited availability of the part time staff members for after hours and additional coaching education sessions. Many of the staff members are committed to full time employment positions outside of their soccer coaching roles, which for many have to take precedence in their time value hierarchy. In addition to this, many of the staff members also balance family responsibilities and their ability to commit time outside of their scheduled coaching sessions and game day commitments becomes extremely limited. This situation creates a difficult environment within which to establish a consistent delivery of relevant, ongoing coaching education content and feedback to our coaching staff. In my role as Director of Coaching for the club I wanted to create a solution that would enable me to have regular contact with my coaching staff to facilitate an ongoing coaching education program that was relevant to the clubs philosophy and provided the opportunity for consistent growth for the staff, with a new and innovative approach. After sitting through Robin Russell’s lecture titled: ‘Developing a Virtual Learning Environment to support coach development’ it was clear this was the direction I needed to go in to find a solution for my problem.
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Mission Statement: ‘To create a ‘Virtual Clubhouse’ for the Lonestar SC San Antonio coaching staff which will more consistently engage them in and expose the staff to an interactive, relevant coaching education program.’ “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for life” – Chinese proverb
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Desired Outcomes: What I hoped to achieve with the development of a ‘Virtual Clubhouse’ was an online place where the staff can log in at anytime from anywhere and observe, create and participate in discussion centered about the coaching philosophy of the club. Through the sharing of ideas, information and opinion I hoped to more deeply engage the staff in thinking about their coaching, its relevance to the program coaching philosophy and ultimately its impact on their players learning. Added to that I wanted to create a closer bond between the staff at the club. We are always running around coaching our teams in the training sessions and then driving around the state coaching the games that we get limited time to learn about and get to know our peers at the club. This space would facilitate and encourage more interaction with each other connected to a subject we are all passionate about, that being coaching soccer. Finally, I wanted this project to improve the coaching environment for the players within our club. The quickest and most effective way to impact large numbers of youth players is to improve the level of coaching they receive. By positively impacting the coaching, we significantly increase the number of opportunities the players have to learn and improve themselves as youth soccer players.
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Theoretical Framework: The vast majority of the coaching staff within the club have at least some online presence ranging from, a limited presence, perhaps posting on a FaceBook account periodically, to a heavy presence, using multiple online social media outlets, blogging and posting coaching opinion and session ideas on the web. So the key challenge was to find a Platform to host this virtual space while keeping the user interface simple and as accessible as possible so as to not discourage even the most infrequent online visitors from adopting the ‘virtual clubhouse’ concept and most importantly contributing. By creating this environment I also hoped to open the eyes of the coaches who, perhaps to this point, had not discovered the sheer gargantuan resources available for coaching on the web. In the process bringing them out of their comfort zone perhaps and helping them add a new string to their bow as a coaching professional.
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INPUTS: Online Platform research included reviewing suitability of the following: Twitter FaceBook Google Hangout Google+ YouTube Scoop It Custom Coaching Session websites and communities Consideration was given to the following: Cost – needed to be low cost and sustainable Ease of Use – needed to be very user friendly Accessibility – needed to be accessible through the multiple online platforms (iOS, Android, OSX, Windows) so as not to prevent participation Closed forum – needed control over access to the information Administration – needed to be simple to administer and manage After some experimentation the decision was made to utilize the Google+ online platform for the project.
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Why Google+? The compelling reason for selecting Google+ as the platform was the fact that I had already introduced the Google Business suite of Apps to the club. Initially this was to professionalize the email system within the staff and board and also introduce the Google Calendar function within the staff. In addition to these two items we wanted to launch Google Drive as a central file repository for the club and remove the need to send attachments with emails that become obsolete pretty quickly as file content changes. So as Google was already an interwoven feature of the program it made sense to expand its use by activating the Google+ portion of the Business Suite offerings. Each staff members club email address and password would serve as log in for the new feature as it did with all the other Google Apps we were utilizing as a club. So the staff were already logging in to their email interface regularly so from there Google+ was literally a click away! Google+ provided the necessary security customization levels and was easily accessible through all of the platforms being utilized by our staff on their computing, tablet or mobile phone devices. Finally, Google has an online help/assistance feature so staff could easily review the information provided or connect online with a customer service representative if they needed help with any of their Google features within the Google Business Apps Suite.
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OUTPUTS: Selecting the platform was the easy part of the decision. Now the choice was made familiarizing myself with the operating system and learning how to best set up the ‘virtual clubhouse’ proved more difficult. I myself had no prior experience of the Google+ feature as I had stopped short of using it for any personal function choosing to use FaceBook myself. I started by taking the free online ‘Google – Basic Exam’ to help me understand more effectively the concepts involved with the Google+ platform and how it differed from those I was familiar with. I was awarded my ‘Google – Certificate of Achievement’ for taking this online exam and I have since asked my program directors to take the free online course to help them become more fluent on the Google Apps suite. Initially I thought simply posting on the Google+ page would be the answer. However this made everything public as I struggled with my understanding of how to post and manage the security settings of the information posted. Additionally I was unable to reach the intended audience, as I did not know the functionality of how we were all to connect with each other. After my initial attempts using my program directors and guinea pigs to review who was able to see postings and how that all worked I was not happy with the results at all. I was still unfamiliar with the Google+ system and became frustrated with my attempts to create in the virtual space, what I had living in my mind. So I stopped the trial and error approach and decided to invest in some deeper web based research of the Google+ platform before I proceeded further. Following a more comprehensive understanding of the way Google+ is designed to work I focused my attention on the exploration of the ‘Communities’ function of the Google+ platform.
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Google+ Community – ‘LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse’ Below is a screenshot of the LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse. This is the interface of the platform once logged in from the Google Chrome browser on a laptop.
As you can hopefully see it’s a simple construction with a clean user interface. Simply scroll up and down to browse content. Click on ‘write’ (top center) to post within the community with additional options for: ‘photos’ ‘link’ ‘video’ ‘event’ all very self explanatory for those looking to respond to the assignments. This was an early shot displaying a Test discussion for the staff to respond to. As you can see at this point the community had only 11 followers as we were still working through the staff’s responses to join the community after being invited – we will discuss this process shortly.
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Below is a screenshot of the LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse accessed through the Google+ App on an iPad (vertical orientation).
‘Photo’ – ‘Location’ – ‘Link’ – ‘Write’ posting shortcuts are missing from the bottom of this image.
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Below is a screenshot of the LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse accessed through the Google+ App on an iPhone (vertical orientation).
‘Photo’ – ‘Location’ – ‘Link’ – ‘Write’ posting shortcuts are missing from the bottom of this image. These shortcut buttons within the Apps make it easy to post content.
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Participation Inclusion: As this projects objective was targeting our coaching staff and their coaching education it was important that it was a simple process to sign up and log in. As previously mentioned no new information would need to be remembered, as log in was seamless with their existing club Google based email account. The process of engagement now required the staff to set up their Google+ account by logging in through any device and executing the simple steps to launch their profile. Then they need simply to accept an Invite to the LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse community that I had posted to their profile as the LSSA Google+ administrator. As soon as this was done they now had full access to the LSSA Staff – VC community and could manage how they received notifications for when new content was posted. While it seems relatively straightforward there were still some staff that took longer to follow the prompts but ultimately we reached a 100% success rate with 24 staff members becoming members of the LSSA Staff – VC community.
After week 1 - LSSA Staff - VC Community Sign Up
Signed up 46%
Not Signed up 54%
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After a disappointing 1st week of engagement from the staff I decided to reach out and provide opportunity for them to come to the club office or to the training field during timeslots where myself or another staff member who was comfortable with the Google+ platform would be available to set them up and ensure they had accepted the invite to the LSSA Staff – VC community. After 2 weeks we had achieved 100% membership to the community.
Assignments: My first action was to post some information myself with ranging topics and ask staff for responses and feedback. From this I wanted to engage the staff and allow them to familiarize themselves with the Google+ platform and hopefully work through the pain of a ‘new administrative task’ discovering along the way that it was a simple interface that would not take up a great deal of their time. I also chose to post the content from the opening Staff Workshop held in the club office to the community. This allowed me to respond to the staff who had been unable to attend the Staff workshop and direct them to the new Virtual clubhouse to review the content them had missed in their absence. The theory behind this was to see how effective this would be and also to connect the staff who routinely have trouble getting to these Staff meetings to the new Virtual Clubhouse as they perhaps more than the other staff would be who this platform was designed to reach more regularly.
After week 3 LSSA Staff - VC community sign up
Signed up 100%
Not signed up 0%
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Below is a screen shot of Assignment #1: (taken from iPad)
Rather than responding within the thread which removed the opportunity to post images, videos and links I asked the staff to begin a new post with their respond and send to the LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse. This would make it private to our staff group (unless they wished to post publicly to their own Google+ profile which was left to their discretion)
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Below are two sample responses to Assignment #1:
Note the comment from another staff member on Taylar’s posting. This was great to see others taking the time to comment on their peers ideas that were being shared.
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Assignment #1 Review: I was very pleased with the level of response to the first assignment. Some great ideas were shared and most promising were the various sources of ideas the staff had utilized. Of course some had gone the old school route of drawing out their session and posting that but, that was still sharing and that was always the objective. One of my hopes was that by seeing some staff post digitally constructed session plans those that still scribbled theirs on pieces of paper would be inspired to seek out a more modern approach to their session planning.
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Future Topic Survey: Before the second assignment was delivered I wanted to provide the staff with the opportunity to provide their opinion on what topics they would like to see discussed in the LSSA Staff – VC. I posted the following to solicit their input:
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Following this request to staff the following is a screenshot of some of the responses received:
The responses show a varied collection of topic ideas. What this did allow me to identify was where the staff were looking for ideas. In addition it gave me insight into what the staff were deliberating the delivery of to their teams and from this information and some follow up questions in conversations with staff, I could identify if they were focusing on the correct session topics for the groups there were working with. After discussing the responses with the program directors and also incorporating our opinions on some overall program focus ideas we wanted to prioritize we settled on ‘Attacking in the Final Third’ for Assignment #2.
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Sample responses to Assignment #2:
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Assignment Overview: Since the launch of the LSSA Staff – Virtual Clubhouse 6 assignments were provided to the staff members during Fall 2014. Test Assignment: LGV’s 1-‐3-‐5-‐2 with Holland & Manchester United. -‐ Assignment #1: Dribbling -‐ Assignment #2: Attacking in the Final Third -‐ Assignment #3: Playing Out of the Defensive Third -‐ Assignment #4: Rondo & Possession Soccer -‐ Assignment #5: Staff Evaluation of the LSSA Staff – VC: Video response
I’ve been very happy with the number of responses and more importantly with the quality of the content in the responses. Below is a statistical analysis of the overall responses to all Assignments:
Overall Response Percentage from Staff.
Percentage of Staff who responded = 79%
Percentage of Staff who did not respond = 21%
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Below is a breakdown of the individual assignment response statistics:
Assignment #1: Dribbling
Staff Responding = 65%
Staff not Responding = 35%
Assignment #2: Attacking in the Final Third
Staff Responding = 65%
Staff not Responding = 35%
Assignment #3: Playing Out of the Defensive Third
Staff Responding =
Staff not Responding =
Assignment #4: Rondo and Possession
Staff Responding = 43%
Staff not Responding = 57%
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For Assignment #5 after consultation with my tutor Robin Russell we came up with the idea of asking for a review of the Virtual Clubhouse experience from the staff who had used it through the Fall season. The twist was we would ask the staff to respond in video format. They would be required to video themselves answering 4 questions delivered by me, which would provide structure to the responses. Here’s a screenshot of the Video Assignment posting:
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Assignment #5 Response Sample: Staff member Diana Driggers responded with the following answers with her video response: “I think it has been a great tool to use for us to share information and ideas with each other. I have enjoyed the opportunity to give and receive feedback with each other and to evaluate the sessions that we have done and reflect on what the kids have got out of the sessions. It has been great to see what other staff have done with their players and hear how they have adjusted and tweaked the sessions they have shared in the Virtual Clubhouse to find more effective ways of stimulating their players learning.” “I think for all of us it is a matter of making time to complete the assignments. I am no different from anyone else in needing to find the time to respond but, I definitely see the benefit of it and have enjoyed learning from my peers. I know that I don’t have all the answers so that has been very helpful.” “With regard to topics to be discussed for the coming season I think it would help me to look at zone defense, more help with playing out of the back, different activities that lend themselves toward teaching the formations that we have identified as a program and transitioning from one to another and some exercises that will help with that. “ Staff member John Buffalo responded with the following answers with his video response: “I have enjoyed the different responses and getting to see other coaches ideas and perspectives of the game. It has helped me get a better understanding of coaching and producing sessions” “I really did not find anything difficult with using the Virtual Clubhouse” “I liked the format and questions asked this past fall season, it made me research or go back through stuff I already had and challenged me to think more about my coaching” “In 2015 I would like to see more sessions from National Team or College Team coaches and then have discussions from issues identified from them” I am grateful to both Diana and John for their video responses and also all the other coaches who committed time and though to their responses.
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Variety of Content used in Responses: Certainly the most pleasing aspects of the responses from the staff are the various types of media formats they have utilized in their responses. Of course, some have been requested as mandatory for the assignment but the staff has shown a good grasp of using the web as a resource for their coaching knowledge and session ideas. Below is a summary image of the types of responses used in Virtual Clubhouse across all 51 responses posted by the staff this fall:
Staff showed technical mastery by taking screenshots on their mobile devices of example sessions from Twitter and other online sources and posting those images. Coaching videos from YouTube were a strong trend in the posting. Links from a variety of websites were also used as sources for the content posted.
Types of Media used in Responses from Staff
Photo shot of Written Plan = 8%
Photo shot of Digital Plan = 37%
Provided a link to a digital session plan = 6%
Provided a link to a video (eg YouTube) = 35%
Provided a Video post (self recorded) = 6%
Provided Text answer = 8%
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Final Evaluation of Staff Response to Virtual Clubhouse assignments: I have been both very happy and somewhat disappointed in the response received for the Virtual Clubhouse. I am happy that many of my staff have received the program so well and engaged themselves in the discussions. The objective was for the staff to take over the content of the Virtual Clubhouse. My role as administrator would be to oversee and pose assignments that the staff would take ownership of creating their responses which populated the ongoing content within the platform. I am somewhat disappointed in those that are yet to become engaged. I have reached out to see what if anything these staff members cite as reasons for not posting and some of the responses received are listed below: -‐ “I wasn’t aware of the assignments!” -‐ “I didn’t know how to post my answers” -‐ “I didn’t have time” -‐ “It doesn’t work on my computer at home’ Sadly I found myself imagining that I was a High School teacher fielding excuses for missing homework assignments. However, I see this section of the staff as a challenging opportunity moving forward. How can I get traction with them and inspire their engagement in the Virtual Clubhouse? Some ideas I have thought about and also discussed with Robin Russell who has also offered up ideas of his own to help the process are: -‐ Partnering staff up having one staff member post and the other commenting with their thoughts on that post, then switching those roles for the next assignment.
-‐ Asking staff to provide the discussion topic for the week and rotating the schedule of who posts through the staff. Each week they would
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then have the opportunity to gain the thoughts and ideas of their peers on a subject or topic of great interest to them.
-‐ Introduce a ranking system by asking the staff to +1 each staff members post if they found it particularly useful to their coaching. Then collating the +1’s received for each post through the season and rewarding the staff with the most +1’s with a gift voucher for example.
As I continue to learn from the experience of administering the Virtual Clubhouse we will use trial and error to find the most effective and productive ways to engage the staff. Overall I am very happy with the quality of responses. The quality of the content has been beyond expectations. The variety of ways it has been sourced and delivered has been really impressive. To have an overall response rate of 79% to what is effectively a new administrative task handed to the staff is very pleasing and gives me lots of positive energy for the future of the Virtual Clubhouse and it’s effectiveness as a coaching education model for our staff.
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Plans for Sustainability: The success thus far of this project provides great motivation to keep developing the format so that it will remain a key role in the coaching education program at the club. As staff engagement is one of the most vital aspects of the program we will continue to experiment with ideas designed to encourage our staff to visit the Virtual Clubhouse and contribute content. Successful ideas will be retained with less successful ideas either adjusted or dropped from the program. I plan to teach my program directors how to provide more specific posting for their own programs. Creating their own Virtual Clubhouse community and inviting the coaches in their program so as to tailor the information and discussion more specifically to the audience. Taking what has been learned to this point the club has plans to create a Virtual Clubhouse for the parents and families of the players so we may populate that community with pertinent information and resources to help our parents and families navigate their way through the youth soccer experience with their players. We have managed to create this Virtual Learning Environment at no expense to the program, which is fantastic ROI value. Moving forward the club has budgeted some resources to coaching education and specifically any development of this online platform we feel will add value to the mission of developing a Virtual Clubhouse for the delivery of a consistent and relevant coaching education program for our staff.
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Appendix: