Final post

So, we are coming to an end of the whole ONL211 journey, and as with most journeys my feelings are a bit divided: Yes, finally! No, already?!

I am so grateful that I signed up for this course and participated and I feel that my newly acquired knowledge is like a huge chest of gold. But I also feel a bit relieved that it is over, as the experience from time to time has been at bit intense.

Expectations vs. reality

From what I expected in advance, this course has given me all that and so much more. I hoped to learn some more about the theories behind successful online and blended learning, and also how to use some different tools for e- collaboration and – activities. What I also got, besides that, was a much deeper background and understanding of learning theories, and research on open networked learning. I also learned a lot more about the importance of learning communities and networks, and how to create, discover, develop and maintain them. I have attended webinars and listened to podcasts with so many truly inspiring researchers in the field, and also found new sources to read and learn more from in the future. The most important thing? I guess it is the great power of learning communities.

PBL-group work

I think the composition of our PBL group, PBL03 was a really good match of people, and that our facilitator and co-facilitator Kelly and Esther so well contributed to glue us together right from the start. We are different people in so many ways, but we also share a lot of common ground. Another thing that we did well on is that we always stuck to what we decided in our common learning agreement document. Actually, I think we shined at this!  

• we try to keep to time
• have a sense of humour 🙂
• Look out for each other (I tend to forget to do this)
• if not able to attend, notify the others 
• Have a positive and supportive attitude 🙂
• share previous experience- good and bad examples 
• actively contribute and participate 
• be curious 
• we are open to try out new tools for our group presentations (each topic/team uses a new tool)
• we communicate in den ONL211 community space and use that space to stay connected
• if we are late or we cannot attend the meeting we will note that in the meeting agenda google document

My greatest challenge

The greatest challenge for me was time management. To combine my daily work and family life with this huge field of exploration that suddenly opened up in front of me. In the beginning I felt a bit overwhelmed by all the information; sources to read, group meetings to attend, scenarios to interpret, shared documents to add findings in, webinars to attend, blogs to read and so it went on.  It sometimes felt like being thrown into cold water, and luckily my team members were there to swim with me. After a few weeks, it felt easier to float along, but to set time limits for myself were absolutely necessary for me.

What I bring with me and how this will influence my practice.

In many ways. I will definitely bring my enhanced knowledge about the power of learning communities and networks, and even more than before encourage my students to explore together. I will also bring the importance of the students to be able to interact with the course content itself, not only me as an instruction or other students. Surely, I will bring the above described thrown-into-the -water felling with me into my own practice, and really ensure that my students are 1. Given explicit instructions in the beginning and 2. Being able to share their start-up experience with each other. (In online training that can be as simple as, if possible, adding a discussion thread called “Your thoughts so far” in the learning management system used. Or create a Zoom-meeting café).   I will bring with me all the inspiration of the use of different tools that me and my PBL-group have explored together. Padlet, Miro, ThingLink, Learning ToolBox, SimpleShow, PowToon, Pictochart. But also, just all the things you could do in an plain Zoom-meeting, like chat bombing, polls, screen sharing with annotation, and liberating structures like 1-2-4-all and Talking object.  My favourite tool of choice? Definitely ThingLink. Try it if you haven’t yet.

I will also bring with me, for my own sake, where to further explore and learn more about this fascinating field. And last but definitely not least: all my new international contacts.  

Thank you ONL-team, all ONL211 participants, and especially PBL03:ers. It has been a lovely journey!

Best, Christina

Here are (some of all) my thougts on the forth topic of ONL211:

Doing by learning as an opposite of learning by doing.

In early 2o20, when the news about a strange virus called Covid-something I was just starting up a course for adult learners via the commissioned training center at our university. The course participants were supposed to meet every three weeks during the year, and so far everything was going as planned. As the course coordinator I was shortly thereafter faced with the fact that we had to move this course online. I contacted the teacher responsible for the following modules, and told her that we had to make this quick change. After a short period of confusion, she calmed me down by saing that we could sort this out toghether. Part of her calm was due to recently participating in a course called Online Networked Learning or ONL. She told me about a five-stage model and Communities of Inuiry, reflective blog posts, and how we could use that framework in our course. For me, since that framework was new to me, that was the start of a period of learning by doing.

Attending ONL myself this spring, I have actually grasped what my colleauge and I were doing together last spring and why. Together with my PBL-group I have been using the same theories and framework, but this time I have been doing by learning.

During this two weeks of topic 4 I have reflected on what blended learning and online learning means, and what kind of activities (or e-tivities as Gilly Salmon calles them [1]) it can contain to be successfull. One thing I will bring with me is the course webinar with Marti Cleveland-Innes and her inspiring words about the principles of blended learning [2]. I also attended a webinar by Stefan Stenbom at KTH Royal Institute of Technology here i Sweden starting with the same point as Cleveland-Innes: If you want to create a good learning enviroment, start by answering the question: What are the students going to be doing? I never used it myself before, but I think that creating a course communication plan, and also digital meeting plans for each session can be a good way to illuminate for oneself what the students (and instructios, TA`s, facilitators etc) are going to do. With all these new tools that we have you might need to sometimes just take a step back and think of how to aling that tools with the goals and the assessment methods stated in the syllabus for the course.

PBL-group work

This time I was one of the host for the topic. I was taking on the topic 4 and the scenario together with my absolutely amazing PBL-colleauge S. She is so knowledgeable, wise, kind and truly inspiring and it was a pleasure hosting with her. As always the group had fun and worked together well. And even if it not always goes as planned we always manage to work things out toghether as a team. We set out to present our work for this topic using PowToon and possibly using a groupspecific YouTube channel, but ended up with Simple Show and a Pictochart. And we are happy with it.

Since I use to mention it, I will also mention it this time: Twitter. I did not attend the tweetchat this time. Without meaning to, I totally forgot about the time. Heard from my fellow PBL-ers that it had been a good session. As the course now has come to an end, I will bury my account and probably forget about the whole twitter ecperience. Conclusion: Everything is not for me. Twitter counts in there.

Next post will be on the whole ONL-experience.

References:

[1] Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model. [Homepage] http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

[2] https://padlet.com/larsuhlin/ONL211T4

Digital stickball and smalltalk?

We are now into topic 4. Designing blended learning. How to do it in the best way?

At my institution I will say we have maybe not extensive, but quite some experience of teaching online classes. For several years we for our pharmacy students ran parallell courses, with the same curriculum, the same learning outcomes and the same learning management system (LMS), but one almost fully online-version and one on-campus version. The campus students physically attended class, and the lectures were at the same time recorded and posted in the LMS for the distance course students to watch. We also used (and still use) a lot of flipped-classrom variants with following seminars and discussions.

No to the thing I want to discuss, an issue I thought a lot about back then, and still think about. How do we best make the distance students feel like they are a part of an actual class or group?

For our on-campus students, we at the start of each semester arranged an evening of playing stickball (rounders). The new students got to meet the second-, and third-year students and us teachers. We gathered in a park, played “kubb” and stickball, grilled sausages (grillkorv) and talked about both education, the university, the city and all kinds of other stuff. (As scandinavians we half the time discussed weather conditions I guess, that is what we mostly do ;-). I don´t remember if the distance learners were even invited..

Now I have just started up a new year long course for adult learners, and I will not be able to meet with them IRL until late autumn. I would love to be able to communicate with them, and even “meet” them in an more informal way, but how to do this digitally? Guess my question is: how do I arrange a digital evening of stickball and smalltalk?

Time to make a blog-friendly summary of topic 3: Learning in communities- networked collaborative learning. This time I will try to make a slightly shorter blogpost.

This topic, for me, was a bit easier to grasp compared to topic 2. As a nursing educator I have quite some experience of networking as we do a lot of work-based education. To interact and learn together with peers is an important part of nursing training. Even in my assigned mission av quality coordinator for the health educations at my institution, I know the importance of collaboration. I is true that collaboration and networking definitely can raise the quality. It is important to be able to optimize learning communitites even online, which of course is the focus of ONL211.

A common context

My deep dive for the investigation of the topic was about creating a common context. The context is an important part of an community of practice (CoP) [1]. What the context of a CoP are of course comes naturally if it is e.g. a research collaboration within a special field. But it also might be created or claryfied like e.g. within a group of students. One important part of the context is the physical context like the place or site (may of course be online) and common collaboration tools. The second part is the social context, where a joint commitment is required (or at least some guidelines on commitment and an agreement on who puts in the most effort).

In a previous course, I have together with colleagues worked with Gillan Salmons 5- stage model [2]. We then used the second step in the stair as a way of successfully visualise our common context. Got a hint from our co-facillitator that we will use tha 5 stage model later on in ONL, and I look forward to that.

My personal experience of PNLs

In relation to my own PNLs, these have mainly existed physically in relations too engaged and committed colleagues, a national pedagogy conference I attend annually and an educator Facebook community. Perhaps this course can be a kick-start for me to broaden into a larger network. Through ONL, I have already met so many people who contribute to my learning experience. I got many tips and ideas from being introduced to the work of Kay Oddone [3].

Our group work

As I wrote about before,my PBL-group PBL03 is the best bunch of people! We communicate so well, and share the experience by trying out all sorts of different tools. This time we have used ToolBox [4]. A very easy-to-learn and informative tool to visualise and share information. I think this tool can be excellent for presenting research data on comferences, but also for collaboration i groups.

Soon to fininsh- some words about theetchat!

Even this time, I attended the tweetchat. But this time only as a spectator. Due to time limits, I was only able to watch while at the same time using my hands for eating a hot bowl of soup. Fewer participants this time I noticed. Since last time I have reflected further on the uses of Twitter, and I have landed in my thoughts of not going to give it another try. I have come to a conclusion that it is better to use the chat function in Zoom to do things like this. As one of my fellow PBLers said: what you write on Twitter will 1) be broadcast out to all your followers + 2) stay there and be searchable forever. What I, or my students, will like to add to a specific topic does not need to be casted out, it is most of the time enough that it is kept in our own context or our network.

Ok, I will stop now.

I told you this would be a short text, but it got quite long anyway. I have so many thougts about this and could continue to write. But I end it here with a wish for a nice weekend!

References:

[1] Cambridge, D. and Suter, V. (2005). Community of Practice design guide: A step-by-step guide for designing & cultivating communities of practice in Higher Education. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). 

[2] The five stage model by Gilly Salmon. (Web page): https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

[3] Oddone, K. Hughes, H. and Lupton, M. (2019) Teachers as connected professionals: A model to support professional learning through personal learning networks. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 20 (3), pp. 102-120

[4] Link to the collaboration tool Learning Toolbox. (Web page): https://my.ltb.io/#/

Struggling to get a grasp..

Ok, a blog post about topic 2.. I realize that this will be a bit difficult for me to compose. I have met several ONL participants the recent week which have said that in their opinion, topic 2 was more tangible and easier for them to approach compared to topic 1. For me, it has been the straight opposite.  

I will be honest with you: I guess my uncertainty depends on that I have not reflected much on openness in education until now, and therefore I have not had a clear picture of what it really means and what it contains. I am here to learn! Besides teaching `regular` campus classes I work a lot with lifelong learning and commissioned training but always on a closed learning platform. The courses I teach are surely done on demand, and for a very specific group of people, but beyond that there is really nothing open about what I do.

Operating in Sweden, there is probably a picture that a lot of what we do in the universities is to be regarded as open per se. As a presumptive student, you are free to apply for higher education as you like. Although basic eligibility for higher studies is needed, and in some cases specific qualifications in the form of subject areas almost anyone can apply. But when you start thinking about it, it may not be as free as it first looks. You have to compete for places with other applicants, and the studies only start at two specific times during the year. Many educations are available at a distance, but you often have to go to campus for close meetings, labs and similar. In terms of payment, as education is free of charge in Sweden, it can in some way be considered fully open. One good thing about that is that you do not have to come from a special background or social class to study. I liked the thoughts of  Ragupathi K. (2020) (the article we were suggested to read for this topic), and the parallels to the coffee house model [1].  I thinks this connects to social justice which is a good thing.

Finding a way through topic 2

So what exactly is openness in education? I have probably seen this as a path with a lot of obstacles. Who owns the material? What about plagiarism? Can anyone take open material and use it as their own, and distribute it? This topic sure started a lot of questions in my head. That said, I think I have explained now how I faced topic 2 as a blank sheet. My first thoughts was:  where do I start?

I started by listening to the podcast posted on the ONL community page 2 [2], and listened to Maha Balis webinar (what a fantastic researcher and lecturer – so inspiring!) Luckily I have a very nice and supportive PBL group with lots of different experiences and perspectives, and we undertook the topic together. The diversity of the group also made me realize the different global aspects of OER. We worked again with the FISH document and a Miro board where we gathered our thoughts and the results of our investigation. This time we also worked with some liberating structures to help us collect our thoughts [3]. Great thanks to Sarah who initiated the work on that. This is something I will surely test together with my students.

My take-homes. So far. (Yes, I am somewhat of a slow learner).

From the group discussions and our collected material I have learned a lot about OER. I have not really landed my thoughts on this yet, and actually think I should let it take the time it takes. But I can surely see more advantages now and not only challenges as before. I have learned how to think about copyright and material, and how labeling is important.

Content curation

Another thing I take with me is thoughts about the emerging change of the roles of the teacher and the student. When we presented our group work, we chose a spider and it`s web as a metaphor. The spider here is the student, the web is the knowledge it spins it around. Sometimes there are holes in the web (power outs or internet limitations) but there are still opportunities for OER. The teacher’s role in this becomes to provide content curation. Sort, structure and lead the student towards hers or his goals. Forward along the path, or when lost: back on the path. Helps them to move forward, points in the right direction.

ThingLink

Last but not least: I will also write a few words about the tool we used this time. ThingLink. I loved it. So fun and easy to use, and very graphic. Perfect to combine with my main area which is anatomy and physiologi; the appearance and functions of the human body. Super easy to connect different materials as movies, texts and pictures. Unfortunately, it was not possible to collaborate in the tools with the free license. Try it!

Reflection week- I really needed that!

Yes, I really needed this reflection week. Sometimes you need to get of the horse and take a break before you sit back up and gallop away.

Thanks for reading 🙂

References:

[1] Ragupathi, K. (2020). Being open: drawing parallels with the Coffee House model.

[2] Podcast on open education by Kiruthika Ragupathi from the National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/openeducation/audio-podcast/

[3] Webpage on Liberating Structures: https://www.liberatingstructures.com/

Topic 1 and PBL-group work

So the first weeks of this experience have come to an end. I will admit that I felt a bit confused in the beginning, with all the new information and all the new people. But connecting to my PBL group, and starting to work with them on Topic 1 have made me feel a little bit less stressed about ONL. I really admire the two leads who not only dared to go first but also managed the work things out really great. Thanks guys! I think we have a very warm and permissive atmosphere in the group. And a lot of fun!

Last week we focused on the F and I-parts of our FISH-document, and this week we focused on the S and H. One of our common goals is to use different tools for each topic to present,  and this time we have chosen a Miro-board. We divided the topic in three focus areas, and my focus area for further investigation was on online policies and strategies for managing the digital traces that we leave behind. I found a very useful article [1], and added some content from it to our board. One take-home-message from the article that I will bring with me is that “Most students will not object to your making information about them available to other students and to course site visitors. However, most students will appreciate knowing that approving access by others to such material is entirely voluntary. I guess this also applies to us as educators. I some topics of our teaching or research areas we might feel comfortable with openly sharing content, in other areas we might only want to share our material in locked communities. I think that a combination of information and awareness about this might be one key. Students (and educators) need to be aware of what they do “sign up for” when posting material. And having a strategy for what to share and what not to share. 

Visitors and Residents

I enjoyed last week’s webinar on the ´Visitor and Resident´-model. Also I read the recommended article [2] and watched the recommended films [3-5]. After a reference from one of my co-PBLers I also checked out David Whites personal site [6]. Havent´s seen the films or looked at his site yet? Definitely worth a visit!

At the webinar we were invited to draw our own ´Visitors and Residents´map, and so I did. I think it is clear from the map that I divide my life into a personal space and a professional space without mixing the use of tools. Workwise I am somewhat of a traditionalist being a visitor of e-mail, Skype, LinkedIN and my institutions Intranet. A resident only with Zoom (clearly since I have worked from home for over a year, I have been connected to Zoom a lot!). Personally I am a resident of social media like Instagram and Snapchat and use it to connect with friends and family:

I guess a lot have happened since I first tried browsing the Internet using AltaVista® back in 1995. The photo below shows me in high school (“högstadiet” in Swedish). And as you can see, our hairstyles back then was copied directly from the Swedish artist Robyn 🙂

Also, I have to mention: Twitter!

As for Twitter I created an account on Monday, 5 minutes before the start of the ONL tweetchat. My first thought was that the speed was super high. Hard to keep up the pace to follow all the new posts with the hashtag #ONL211. Or maybe that was my own lack of speed, since Twitter was absolutely new to me. But then one of the facilitators wrote that it is ok to be slow, which I suppose is true whenever trying things for the first time. Long story short: I cannot say that I immediately felt thrilled about Twitter, and I do not know if I will ever use it as a tool in my teaching. But I each case- now I have tried it.

And now some rest…

In IRL life, this week I have been bugged by some angry virus. So another new experience for me this week was doing a Covid-test. Even with several years of experience working in health care, self-sampling with a q-tip up the nose felt somewhat strange and awkward. Luckily the Covid-test came back negativ. Yet I look forward to have some rest this weekend.

Wish you all a good one!

Best, Christina  

References:

[1] Waterhouse S. and Rogers R.O. (2004)  The Importance of Policies in E-learning Instruction. Educause Quarterly, 27(3), 28-39.

[2] White, D. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).

[3] David White: Visitors and residents (part 1) Film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI

[4] David White: Visitors and residents- Credibility (part 2) Film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U

[5] Dough Belshaw: The essential elements of digital literacies. Film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78&t=500s

[6] http://daveowhite.com (website).

This week has been a lot of fun! I have now been connected to my fellow colleagues in PBL-group 03, and we have introduced ourselves to each other. I find the composition of the group very successful, with people from different backgrounds, with different careers, different experiences, from different parts of the world (and time zones!). I guess that what we have in common is that we look forward to this experience and what the future weeks will bring us in terms of challenges and possibilities. A huge *thank you* to our facilitator and co-facilitator Kelly and Esther for creating such a welcoming atmosphere.

I will bring the experiences from this Connecting week with me in my own teaching. I have felt totally safe this week despite all the new information, all the things too read, all the new people to learn the names of and so forth. To make someone brave enough to explore the world before them you have to create a safe place for them to fall back into when needed. ONL-team: you have succeeded!

So, Friday afternoon is apparently my time for blogging.. What will this weekend bring? We will se. Wish you all a nice one!

Best!

//Christina

My expectations for this course (and some thoughts for the weekend).

Soon this week will be over and the “Getting started” week of ONL 211 will come to an end. This week I have started the blog, explored the ONL community space, read the course information and the most of all participants’ greetings and hellos. I have also tried to reflect on what my personal aims for attending this course are, and what I hope to develop during this spring.

Hopefully I will develop a better understanding of both the challenges and the possibilities of online education, and explore (more) ways to collaborate and communicate online. This week has been challenging in the way that all of this, the community and the blog is new to me. I can totally relate this to what some of my students went through the challenging days of March last year, when they were “thrown” into the online environment from one day to the other.- As they did, I will surely survive this experience better off.

Today the sun is shining and the weather forecast says the weekend will be sunny here in Karlstad. As for all of us, the time in isolation from family and friends during the winter have been hard for me, so I really look forward to meet my best friends for an outside taco-dinner this evening. Hopefully there will also be time for some nice walks (or maybe a run) in the sun during the weekend.

See you on Monday! Best,

//Christina