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?
Hi Christina, one thing that pops in my mind, while reading your blog post is: there are certainly ways to create a digital substitute for stickball and smalltalk. But for sure, they will never be a sufficient substitute for the real experience. But this is something that we have to keep in mind…. and then put the insuffiency aside, to make room for creating a digital alternative. There are tools out there like wonder.me or spatial.chat, that allow participants to move around freely in a videoconference enviroment, which are perfect for informal gatherings outside of zoom and co. and then finally, one day… we are actually able to meet in person again 🙂