Design for online and blended learning

SCENARIO: TOPIC 4

“This year has seen higher education institutions respond to the impact of Covid-19 in an unprecedented manner. Due to this “emergency remote teaching and learning” situation I have been forced to move online and I have learnt a lot. But it seems that many of my colleagues, including myself, simply have copied our campus activities into synchronous online sessions and are providing students with material for self-study. I experience that we lose a lot of student engagement and a sense of community, therefore I believe that I need to re-think my teaching practice. It also feels like my role is changing towards being a designer for learning and to be more of a facilitator, which is new to me. When searching for support in this area, I came across the Community of Inquiry and some other models that looks interesting. But I am not sure how to use these as tools for design and how do I get everyone onboard, it seems like a lot to consider?!”

My reflectionsions on this topic

As previously mentioned in my blog, the dental hygienist education has been a distance education since the mid-2000s. The course design has consisted of lectures at the start of the course, followed by different material for self study, assignments and different forms of examination. When applying for the degree right for the education in 2019, it was decided that distance education was a continued concept. In spring 2020, we were two teachers employed from the previous education and three newly hired teachers. It was decided that I would be the course coordinator for the first course in the program.
I had no experience from the learning platform Canvas because we still had the platform Its learning during the closure period of the previous program. We therefore hired the Education Pedagogical Unit at the university for some pedagogical seminars. Among other things, we went through ABC Learning Design, UCL. https://abc-ld.org/

ABC curriculum design involves planning a course consisting of various activities in the course such as; acquisition, collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice and production. These activities should then be planned into weekly modules in the course. For me, this was not obvious and a challenge in how this would be implemented in practice. I therefore participated in several workshops during the spring to gain knowledge in how to build a course in the learning platform Canvas. I was informed that I would build in social activities, which was important for distance students who might otherwise feel lonely.

After watching the video with Marti Cleveland- Innes, I understand the approach with course design and the meaning of blended learning much better. The five-step model also provides support for a structured course design (Gillian Salmon). https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html
To create good pedagogy for students in online learning, I need to change my traditional role as a teacher and design my courses so that they provide instructions, support and commitment to learning.
Students’ commitment on a cognitive level can be achieved through good course design and logical content of meaningful activities. On an emotional level, it is important to explain to students why learning activities such as webinars, group discussions and group work, etc. are important. Partly to be able to achieve the course objectives, but also to achieve a better collaboration with other students. At the behavioral level, e-learning materials with repeated key information and in various multi-media formats are important. For social engagement, I can create pedagogical processes with ABC-design and assist students in learning processes.

Blended learning is a learning model that combines different learning techniques delivered with a Learning Management System (LMS). In blended learning, I can use asynchronous and synchronous activities chosen for the best purpose for learning activity, and also chose digital tools appropriate for the learning.
Course design should include:

Social presence: the interpersonal reltionships in an online community such as activities in online spaces and structured activities to provide facilitation from me as a teacher and to provide relationships between students.

Teaching presence: is described as the effort and activity around the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes in learning communities for the purpose of realising personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning. It aslo include specified times for learning activities and examinations. Instructional guiding in course/ topics and feedback to help students understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Cognitive presence: problem based learning activities, triggering events and varied materials and approaches to engage students.

Emotional presence: Emotions is a part of humans experiences and it is important to support students to express emotions.

Boylens, De Wevers & Veet (2017) has written that designing blended learning with multimodal learning is to:

Incorporate flexibility

Stimulate interaction

Facilitate students’ learning processes

Promote an affective learning climate

So how did I design my first course in blended online learning?
The students presented themselves with text and photos as well as their expectations of the education and the future profession when the course started. After a synchronous course introduction in Zoom with 50 students, the students were divided into smaller learning groups of 5 students. Recorded lectures were posted during the course. We had weekly synchronous meetings where students had the opportunity to ask questions about the course content. Sometimes we had a special theme and breakout room for smaller group discussions. In this way, they got to know students outside their own learning group. They did one group work and one individual work which was presented in two different seminars. The students also created a blog for their own reflections. (This gave me a special experience when students failed to create a blog and the difficulty of connecting the student’s blogs to Canvas.)The course ended with an exam. The course evaluation was positive both in terms of content and structure.

My own evaluation is that there is a lot left to learn and do when it comes to develop my own course design.

In PBL13 we used the digital tool Canva for the presentation of this topic.