Monthly Archives: May 2021

Seeing an online teaching as a place to growth (as a teacher)

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in #ONL211, Topic 5: Lessons learnt – future practice

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Photo by Emmanuel Mbala on Unsplash

I am in a privileged position: I was not under (pandemic) emergency to move my teaching online (mostly due to the fact that I have been teaching on an hourly basis). Thus, I have had time to plan and prepare, or even more — to first educate myself in pedagogies for online and blended learning and teaching. One of such courses that I have recently participated in was the Open Networked Learning (ONL211) — an international open course on e-learning in higher education. My good friend, Dr. Judit Hahn, recommended me this course as she herself completed it earlier.

Since the beginning, I have had rather mixed feelings about it. This was mostly due to the pedagogical approach, on which the course was designed, that is, the problem based learning — approach, which was completely new to me. For each two weeks, following a specific topic related to online education, we were confronted (i.e., eight learners and two facilitators) with a scenario, based on which we created our learning. In addition, once per week there was a lecture or workshop by na expert, organized to support our thinking within the given topic.

At first, I did not like a relatively unstructured way of learning — a learning that each group and each individual learner have had to create. However, the longer the course lasted, the more I have been enjoying being my own facilitator of learning, taking agency with peer-learners in the process. I must admit, I have always been rather skeptical to asynchronous online courses, not really experiencing learning in such contexts. However, my main take-away from the ONL is that learning, indeed, can happen in such format if only the course is well-designed and if learners are sufficiently motivated. Our motivation as learners was high. Thus, I think that as a teacher in online environment, I should even more work on the course design, because I may not always be able to influence students’ motivation.

The topics that I explored during the ONL course helped me to see that there is a lot of potential in online education. Challenging is, however, to come out of one’s comfort zone in order to see this potential and to learn as a teacher. Still, isn’t it that we should constantly develop our skills as teacher and broaden knowledge?

Designing for a meaningful (5-day) online learning experience

14 Friday May 2021

Posted by in #ONL211, Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning

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Currently, I am planning an online 5-days intensive course for the summer school. This is not an emergency, ad hoc transmission to the online environment as many of my colleagues have experienced with their regular courses last year (tough, the summer school has always been organized in my institution as face-to-face teaching throughout four weeks, with one course per week).

Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash

Considering the fact that, in principle, I have more time for planning, I wanted to create a truly “online learning experience”. However, almost immediately came the first obstacle — students who signed up for the course are coming from the very different time zones, which makes it impossible to bring all of them together at the same time. Thus, we decided with my colleague (with whom I will be teaching this course) to have two, the same, synchronous classes for each of the “time-zone group”. All other activities will be taught asynchronously, and thus, they have to be designed to enhance students’ engagement in the learning process. At the moment, we think about one overall scenario for the course (like a game, in which you collect scores) and a number of group activities leading to a group project, all supported by learning material packages per specific topics.

Blended learning is not only about blending online and offline teaching, but it also means to blend various forms of teaching — and I prefer to understand it this way. In an online course, the teacher acts as a facilitator of learning, who helps students to navigate between synchronous and asynchronous activities, guiding the learning process. Until this summer school course, I have not realized that planning an online course (especially in its intense format) is much more demanding than planning a face-to-face teaching. I am thinking here, of course, about a meaningful learning experience, when students are truly engaged in the course material in various ways (games, group collaboration, scenarios, projects, etc.). In his lecture, Steven Mintz (2021) points out that students learn when they are mentally involved, when they are engaged in hands-on activities, when they are in the process of discovery, investigation, interpretation. In a similar vein, Marti Cleveland-Innes (2021) highlights that students who are given choices (in terms of the learning material, activities, forms of assessment), perceive that they are making contribution to their learning environment and this increases engagement.

The more I read about the design of online and blended learning, the more I get fascinated about possibilities it offers for students. However, will I be able to implement some of them in an intensive format of the summer school, considering the obstacles of time zones and limited time for students’ reflection on their learning process?

References

Cleveland-Innes, M. (2021). Blended and online teaching and learning: Identifying pedagogical change in higher education. ONL211 topic 4 Intro video (9:35 min). Video on YouTube

Mintz, S. (2021). How to Design a Course for Maximum Student Engagement: Seven Innovative Approaches. Webinar presentation (60 min) Recording

Community and collaborative learning in an online classroom

03 Monday May 2021

Posted by in #ONL211, Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

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How to design an online course is such a way that it leads to the meaningful learning process for students? And how to make this process collaborative? — By collaboration, I mean here a truly engaging work throughout the course, not just a group work assigned to students.

I think that it all should start from making a distinction between two pairs of words, often misinterpreted: cooperation vs. collaboration and group vs. community. The first pair, cooperation and collaboration, are often used interchangeably in academic context, both in teaching and in research. I would say that collaboration is more meaningful, and thus, it requires more effort from all collaborating parties. In pedagogical practice, this can be a collaboration between teachers (challenging, but rewording) and collaboration between teacher(s) and students as well as among students. In the last case, a semantic distinction between group and community also comes to the forefront: in a group work, students need to, at least, cooperate, but in order to create a (learning) community —they need to collaborate.

How can the teacher help students to create a learning community and enhance learning collaboration? First of all, the course has to be designed around the idea of peer-learning, not simply as a (number of) group works with the divisions of tasks. The most efficiently, we learn from each other, because our human nature is social. However, in order for students to learn together, they need motivation and encouragement. Both of these can and should be generated and strengthened by a good facilitator of learning, namely, the teacher.

Finally, the aspect that requires the most re-thinking is assessment. In a community collaborative learning, there is a need to look at both the result and the process of learning. For the purpose to assess a result — a rubric can be created; but assessing a learning process is more challenging. An ideal option will be to collect peer-feedback and students’ individual summative assessment of their learning. However, if students are not used to such forms, but are more familiar with exams or course essays, their reflection on the learning process may not be that meaningful. And yes, now I am coming to the key point: reflection as a learning tool. I am still discovering it, both as a teacher and as a student, a long-life learner. I have experienced it in its various forms, including student’s learning diary, teacher’s reflective diary, a blog post, and a reflection on my teaching practices through analysis of my video-recorded classes. Thus, I also know how difficult it is to reflect on one’s own learning. However, the more conscious we are about our own learning, the more effective a community learning process can be — and so the collaboration will be more productive, when learners are more conscious about their learning goals.