Advancing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Large Enrolment Courses: Lessons Learned from an Online Community of Practice

Abstract

In these conference proceedings, we describe how the COVID-19 pandemic presented the higher education community with an opportunity to explore and expand best practices in blended and online teaching through a Large Enrolment Community of Practice. We expand on Wenger-Traynor and Wenger-Traynor's (2015) description of a community of practice (CoP) as a “living curriculum” (p.4) to include an online perspective based on Hoadley (2012) and Xue and colleagues’ (2021) considerations of content, process, and context. The benefits of the online CoP to faculty development and the scholarship of teaching and learning, specifically through collaboration, interdisciplinarity, innovation, and validation are then explained. The conclusion contains a current birds’ eye view of the OCoP and summary of learning from the first year of implementation.