ONL: Shift Happens!

The start: Expectations, and some chaos

When I signed up for ONL202, I already knew it was going to take some time. But I thought that having thirty something years of teaching experience, and several years in blended or online formats, I would be well prepared. I expected to learn a bit more about some new cool digital tools, and to meet likeminded people from all over the world. But still, most of my own teaching had been quite traditional, despite the use of some digital tools… Would I be able to take in all that new stuff?

Teaching on a PhD-course in Kampala, Uganda, June/Sept 2014. Photo: Linda Wennbom Åström.

Starting the ONL-course, everything seemed somewhat chaotic: a home website with info about the topics we would cover, another site on Google Drive for our work in PBL-groups, webinars and meetings on Zoom, Padlets to fill out, a blog to write… It did take a lot of time to get everything working, and to get used to the way the course works.

The course: from chaos to clarity

But a couple of weeks into the course, I noticed a little shift: it all began to feel more natural. I prepared for each topic by reading the material provided, I checked for more information on the topic, and during our group discussions I could easily switch between different documents, while sharing my screen, keeping an eye on the chat, and trying to write personal notes at the same time. Such fun! The best way to describe the whole process, however overused the analogy might be, is to compare it to a journey. I was definitely on my way!

Group dynamics

One of several interesting observations I made entails group dynamics. I used to teach group dynamics and am well familiar with the different stages, with what works and what doesn’t, and how to turn things around for a better result. But here I found myself right in the middle of it! It was as if teacher-me was observing student-me, and the whole experience was quite meta – we learned about learning as part of the group, but also as a group and from the group. Three words to describe these group dynamics: fun, instructive, rewarding.

Digital tools

One of my expectations, as I mentioned, was learning to use new digital tools for online learning. Those expectations were met. Thoroughly. I never knew it would be so much fun to explore new presentation tools together with people I had only known for a few weeks! We learned a lot from each other and had fun doing so. This made me want to explore more cool tools for online learning! Three words to describe these tryouts: informative, enjoyable, addictive.

Theoretical backgrounds

Another thing I really appreciated during ONL was the excellent mix of being able to refresh my previous knowledge of pedagogical theories, models, and platforms on the one hand, and learning about a lot of new research and concepts from prominent guest speakers on the other hand. The fact that we immediately put it into practice in our PBL group, starting out from a given scenario, and that we were urged to reflect upon what we had learned and what that would mean for our future teaching was a great learning experience in itself. Three words to describe this mix of theory and practice: exciting, curiosity-provoking, productive.

The present: here I am

Here I am, five fun and interesting topics later, at the end of the ONL course. So how do I feel after all I have learned? First, I experience a renewed and deepened interest in keeping up with current developments in digital tools for online learning, even more so than before. As an educational developer that’s part of my work, but I plan to make it a recurring part of my external monitoring two hours per week. Second, a reflection on my own learning process. Personally, I like structure. A lot. So the structured way of this ONL course was really appealing to me: starting with a scenario, using the FISH-document to document our group progress, resulting in a presentation of our own choice, what’s not to love about that? In other words, ONL got under my skin and into my brain. I notice myself viewing a lot of what I do regarding teaching and learning through an ONL lens – a FISH eye objective (pardon the pun). And third, I cannot stress the importance of collaborative learning enough. Learning really is a social constructivist activity, whether it happens on campus or online or in blended forms. Also, I have the feeling that we really got to know each other in our PBL group. I would absolutely like to stay in touch with other ONLers, preferably via LinkedIn. Feel free to contact me there! Or, to use an old MTV-slogan from the early eighties: Keep in touch with the Dutch!

The future: what’s next?

As far as the future is concerned, I plan to integrate what I’ve learned here into my teaching practices. I read somewhere: ”you didn’t come this far to only come this far”, and that seems very appropriate to me now. It would be a waste not to apply the knowledge, the structure, the tools, models, platforms, concepts, and theories. So, with the risk of sounding like a newly-converted sect member, I’m going to keep on going, and keeping up that ONL spirit!

Photo: Austin Ban via Unsplash

I would like to thank the whole ONL team, the facilitators, and of course my fellow PBL01 colleagues.

Designing Online and Blended Learning: the story of a teacher

Photo: Nicolette Karst CC 4.0 BY NC SA

The phone call

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep!

– Hello, this is teacher XX speaking?

– Hi there teacher, Corona here. I just want to let you know that from now on, you need to teach everything online. Just make sure you include all students, provide social, cognitive, and teaching presence (or learner-learner, learner-content, and learner-teacher interactions), create a safe athmosphere for everyone involved, have plenty of digital tools to activate your students and stimulate interaction. That’s it. Oh yeah, you better not just shift everything online that you’ve done on campus up until now, but rather design an online and blended learning experience. Good luck!

– But… but… OMG?! Nooo! How do you think I will do that, in so little time? Where can I get the adequate support? What tools should I use? How about the quality of my teaching? Do I need to include video, tape my lectures, put them online? And how about my students, how do I get them onboard and participating all engaged and active?

– Yeah, well, I dunno. Ask your educational developer, I guess, or your instructional designer, and the IT department and student support services too, while you’re at it. You’re smart, you’ll wing it. No more time to chat, gotta call other teachers. Cheerio!

The inner dialogue

My goodness, that’s a lot to think about for every single class! Let’s see, there must be some help somewhere, some way of putting it all together. If I check with my networks via LinkedIn, Zoom, Teams, and Facebook, and combine the tips I get there with what I learned in various workshops and webinars on digital tools and online learning, I’m sure it’s a good start.

The design process

I remember some useful concepts, models, and frameworks. Let’s see. I need to ensure that all students are included in my teaching, that I reach all of them. The Universal Design for Learning framework is the perfect starting point. And then, Community of Inquiry seems a good framework for online and blended teaching and learning. It combines all the different ”presences” that Corona talked about on the phone. If I add some hands-on principles of good practice, it’ll be even easier to check what I should do.

Then we have Gráinne Conole’s 7 C’s of Learning Design, where my to-do list as a teacher is divided into seven active verbs, as it were. And if I look at this practical list of activities to activate my students, I should be able to actually DESIGN my online and blended learning experience!

The wishing list

I guess that all teachers now have to educationally develop ourselves, do instructional learning design, and become learning technology experts. Or do we already have such faculty roles at our university? (…) Yes! It appears we do! Hurray! But what I would really like for us teachers is to have ONE place to go to when we need support in all this. One place where we can find pedagogical and technical support, or sign up for a short workshop on digital tools or online teaching or the use of video in education. Let’s see if the university website has information on where to find such help… Well, blimey! No need for a wishing list; it already exists!

The reflection

After having taught online for almost two terms now, I’ve learned a lot. I also learned that it wouldn’t have been possible to do without the community we have, my different networks, and the support services. The fact that I as a teacher had to learn a lot in a short time helped me understand my students much better. It also made me realise that we gain a lot by helping each other, and communicating to the students what we do, why and how. And last but not least: we should not feel inadequate because our teaching has not been perfect; good enough is good enough!

The references

For references, just follow the links in the text to get to the source!

Let’s work together!

In this blog post I reflect on collaborative learning. Thinking about teaching and learning activities in general, I like to depart from simple questions. What is it? Why do we do it? How do we do it? So even in this reflection, I take these questions as a starting point. And yes, I stole the title for today’s blog post from one of the best known songs of a band that became famous after their Woodstock performance, Canned Heat.

Photo ”Group Work” by Nicolette Karst CC 4.0 BY NC

What?

What is collaborative learning, then? Isn’t it the same as cooperative learning? The terms are used interchangeably often enough. But no. Very simply, the difference can be explained as two forms of group work, where cooperative learning mainly focuses on the product, while in collaborative learning the process is the most important. Another definition of CL (collaborative learnnig) is offered by the Instructional Design and E-Learning taskforce at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands: ”Learners engaged in CL share common goals, depend on each other’s contributions, evaluate each other’s ideas and monitor the work of their team members to successfully complete a task and solve a complex problem”.

Dron & Anderson’s (2014) definition of social learning can easily be applied to collaborative learning: it is ”not only enhanced and stimulated through reactions, discussion, and arguments with others, but also much knowledge confirmation, interpretation, contextualization and validation happens through interaction with others”.

Why?

So, why should we engage in collaborative learning? Brindley, Walti & Blaschke (2009) provide an answer by listing several benefits of collaborative learning: it develops critical thinking skills, it fosters reflection and transormative learning, and it enables the co-creation of knowledge and meaning.

Another reason for applying collaborative learning in one’s course is employability, even though the word isn’t the buzz it was some ten years ago. Still, in their future jobs, our students need to be able to work together with others, to make meaning of what is around them, to solve problems together. Other skills such as time management and leadership are also trained in collaborative work, so to counter the question of why we should use collaborative learning, I’d say: why not?

How?

Over to the million euro question, then. Collaborative learning doesn’t happen all by itself; as a teacher, you need to take several things into account in order to create a beneficial environmnet for collaborative learning to take place. I found Caroline Haythornthwaite’s article from 2019 particularly interesting, as she ends each section with practical recommendations on how to facilitate collaboration. As a teacher, you should design the task at hand to be relevant, structured and clear, but at the same time flexible to allow for learner autonomy. Take group size into account, too. Give clear instructions and have the students understand why you add this collaborative learning task at this point in your course, how they will benefit from doing it, and if/how it will be graded. Provide enough time to accomplish the task. Monitoring the student groups is also part of your job.

My personal experience

I’d like to share one epersonal experience of collaborative learning. But first, I should provide a quick background. For five years (2010-2015), I worked as an educational developer & project manager at the Swedish university of agricultural sciences, designing a strategy to implement generic skills. Group work was one of those skills – there were eight in total, already defined before I was employed.

I wrote a document that later served as a policy document, which among other things included three steps of progression for each generic skill, taking into account the introduction, the amount of scaffolding, and the examination of each generic skill.

I worked with the teachers, offering workshops on how they could include collaborative learning in their courses, working closely together in creating tasks and setting up criteria for examining/grading those tasks.

For the students, I designed introductory and more advanced lectures on the topic, and I created documents for them to fill out during their group work. Those documents comprised of a group contract, where they could record their own rules, contact details, meeting place and frequency, decisions taken, etc. An evaluation form was also included to assess progress and efforts for the group as a whole, but also for each individual group member.

While some students were not too enthusiastic in the beginning – why should we draw up contracts for just one group assignment? – the vast majority found the structured way of collaborative work beneficial, according to the course evaluations.

The most positive part of this was the satisfaction of the teachers, now having a joint platform to start from regarding generic skills (group work, in this case) in their own teaching. They were also happy with the recurring teacher development days and pedagogical lunches I organised together with the dean and staff from the library and the student support services, on the topic of generic skills, examination, curriculum design, information literacy, feedback, and more.

Reflecting on group work, there is a kind of meta-dimension to it: in the example above, my work with the teachers was collaborative in itself, and in turn, it lead to the teachers incorporating collaborative learning in their own teaching. In this ONL course, the work in our PBL-group was collaborative, too, of course. We all learned from each other, sharing knowledge at the same time. To see theory working in practice was highly rewarding.

Every once in a while, when designing assignments, just before grading them, or when finishing a course, I like to go back to those simple questions I wrote starting this blog post. I find that if I can answer for myself what I do, why, and how, and if I can explain that to my students, it creates a common frame work or structure. And that feels good.

References

Jane E. Brindley, Christine Walti & Lisa M. Blaschke (2009): Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environmnet. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 10 (3).

John Dron & Terry Anderson (2014). Teaching crowds: Learning and social media. Athabasca University Press.

Caroline Haythornthwaite (2019). Facilitating collaboration in online learning. Online Learning 10 (1). ISSN 2472-5730.

The song ”Let’s Work Together” by Canned Heat works perfectly as the title for this blog post!

Open, Sesame!

Image by Mona Eendra via Unsplash

The topic for this reflective text is Opennes in Education. I have thoroughly pondered upon it over the last two weeks. I started by examining the content of the word ‘open’ looking at how it is used in various idiomatic expressions. I found that many had a positive ring to them and nice images popped up in my head when reading them. Try for yourself – what do you think about when you hear an open book, be open with, out in the open, or open one’s mind to something?

There are people who stress the disadvantages and dangers of open education, of putting themselves and their material out there in the open. Often, this originates from an insecurity: who can do things to my material? Is my material of a good enough quality? Will I still have ownership of my material when I put it online? Who is going to pay me for the time I invest in it? And what about copyright issues and plagiarism? Of course, you need to take certain measures before you share your material, and luckily, there are guides for that.

In my opinion, the benefits of open education outweigh the disadvantages. I think that there is no other option than to open up education. Anywhere. For everyone. During the pandemic, we’ve seen how quickly teachers switched from classes on campus to teaching online. Flipped classroom has never felt more natural. The use of video and other digital tools has increased enormously over the last six months. Universities and publishers have opened up and made their content available online for free. And cooperation between teachers, on national and international levels, has taken off and gathered speed. The main reason for this is to make knowledge easily available to more people. That in itself illustrates an important aspect: the democratic value of open education. To me, open education is a goal rather than a topic of discussion. Hence, the question is not ”Should we open up education?” but rather ”How shall we open up education?”.

The answer is not an easy one, as there are many aspects to consider before opening up your classes/teaching/materials. To name but a few: what is the purpose? In what format should you present it? For whom? What are the benefits for you as a teacher and for your learners? And if learning takes place, what kind of learning is it?

Attaining open education works best when done in cooperation with others. Of course, there is the advantage of pedagogical development of the individual teacher, but if you work together with others, your institution/s and university/ies benefit as well. The time-saving aspect is another one: you don’t need to invent the wheel again on your own, but can start building that car together. And don’t forget the fun and satisfaction of creating online material together!

So, you’re all set to open up now. But how prepared is your university to opennes in education? In International Education Studies, the following article Are universities ready to recognize open online learning? discusses that. Also, opening up education can have a positive impact for the university as a whole. In an interview published on the website of the Open Online Consortium, Anka Mulder from TU Delft in the Netherlands gives four reasons for embracing open and online education: idealism, reputation, innovation, and quality. She describes open education at her university in five words: acces to higher education, innovation and quality. A good example for other universities to follow, if you ask me.

In PBL-group 01, we interpreted the scenario of a teacher wanting to open up their teaching, and took the following stances: How open am I? How can I open up? And last but not least, How can I get students & colleagues on board? In stead of summarizing our discussions, feel free to take a look for yourself at our Prezi.

A single blog post is too small to cover all aspects of openness in education, or to answer all the questions. I can only advise you to take a look at the presentations of the other PBL-groups – a true treasure chest of shared knowledge on the topic. During these two weeks, I have learned a lot from disucssing with my fellow PBL01-ers, but also from reading articles, blogs, and other material regarding open education. The more I read and discovered, the more positive I felt that open education is the way to go. When working on my own teaching, I now automatically think: how could I open this up and make it available to others?

This topic really opened my mind!

References:

Margarita Tereseviciene, Elena Trepule, Estela Dauksiene, Giedre Tamoliune & Nilza Costa (2020). Are universities ready to recognize open online learning? International Education Studies Vol. 13, No. 2.

Online participation and digital literacies: making sense of a brain stew

Fully immersed in the first topic of the ONL-course, I’m aware that it is much more time-consuming than I anticipated, despite the fact that all participants were warned about this. ‘Online participation and digital literacies’ is a challenging topic, though, and a fun one at that. I’m sure that in a scan, my brain looks very much like a musty stew with its ingredients (thoughts, concepts, and articles I’ve read) visibly bobbing around in there. Even in my sleep I’m trying to make sense of it all.

Image: Louis Hansel via Unsplash

In this blog post, I address one particular ingredient in my brain soup that stayed with me: the concepts of digital Visitor/Resident, proposed by David White and Alison Le Cornu (2011). In this typology, the Visitor sees the web as a set of tools, and leaves no social trace, however impossible that may seem in this day and age. The Resident, on the other hand, sees the web as a series of places and people, going online to engage with others, leaving social traces and building a digital identity.

Reflecting upon it, I see myself as a Visitor in some aspects, and a Resident in others. Also, there’s a clear difference between what I do and who I am online professionally as opposed to privately. And sometimes, these two blend together nad overlap each other. An example: for my work as a teacher, I search for information online, in databases and branch magazines or blogs, and I read massive amounts of scientific articles to make sure I’m up to date with the latest research in my field. I also watch videos, instructive ones and recordings of lectures or webinars I missed. So far, these are typical Visitor activities.

Privately, my online activities comprise of engaging with family and friends through Facetime, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook, and of winding down by browsing sites like Hemnet (a Swedish housing site) or Pinterest. Every once in a while, though very rarely, I might even buy something online. All in all, these would be Resident activities.

Defining who I am online gets tricky because of the fact that I also engage in what David White defines as Resident activities in my professional life: I engage with others through Zoom or Teams, and I share documents through Google Drive and other services, to name but a few things. On the same note, I could be defined as a Visitor privately, for instance while banking online, or reafing magazines via Readly.

The take-away message here is that hardly anyone is either a Visitor or a Resident; we are all a little bit of both. I still struggle to wrap my head around the part of ”leaving social traces”, as I think that anything we do online leaves a trace. It stands to argue to what extent these traces are indeed social or not – a matter of definition, I suppose. But I must admit that sometimes when I’m online, be it professionally or privately, I find myself asking: ”Am I a Visitor or a Resident now?”

Reference

David White and Alison Le Cornu (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16 (9), at https://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049, accessed 6 October 2020.

A new first!

So this is what it feels like to be blogging! Interesting. Although I’m still somewhat confused about the difference between the tabs ”Home” and ”Blog”. Oh well, I guess it ‘ll sort itself out somewhere along the way.

Anyways, I’m supposed to be writing reflective blogposts regarding topics we discuss in a course I’m enrolled in, Online Networked Learning. Here’s a first reflection, before the course starts: As this blogging experience is completely new to me, I feel a bit insecure. And at the same time, I feel excited to learn something new. So I think I know how new students feel when they start university – a lot of new routines, new people, new knowledge presented in different ways, new digital tools, and what not, creating a mix of feelings rangeing from being uncomfortable and insecure to being excited and eager to dive into this new phase in life.

To be able to connect to my audience in some way, to first year students and teaching staff alike, makes it easier for me to cater the content of what I want to teach to the people attending my class or workshop.

I’m really looking forward to discussing teaching and learning topics with so many people from all over the world! And although this ONL-course may seem a bit overwhelming at this point, I’m sure this too will sort itself out once I get started.

Let’s go!

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