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The future of higher education is spelled blended learning. At least where we are right now, making a clear distinction between what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘online’ In the future, this division will most certainly be more blurred as technology will become more integrated in our corporality. Everything will be blended, or perhaps merged, so to say.

Following this, it will be quite uninteresting what the tool used is and more important what the tool does. How it shapes the situation and affect us humans while learning. Knowing the effects of how education is design will be a central competence for all teachers. The TPACK framework suggests that teachers not only need content knowledge and pedagogical skills but also technical knowledge to be able to choose the right tool (Koehler & Mishra, 2009).

And here is where I think we will struggle a bit for the next upcoming years. My own personal reflection is that teachers, brave enough to embark on the online-learning-journey, tend to overestimate digital tools. Perhaps due to a personal interest. Or maybe they feel they need to compensate for all the other teacher’s underestimation of digital tools. Anyway, the risk I imagine myself to see here is that we tend not be sufficiently long-term in our perspectives and also to miss out on the holistic nature of learning (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). I covered some short-term aspects of this in relation to learning in my last blog post. But what I want to highlight here is the more longstanding aspects that appears perhaps over a semester, a school year or even a whole program.

As teacher, we need to carefully consider both the short-term and the long-term effects of how our courses are designed. This of course includes effects on learning, time and cost-efficiency, student’s immediate needs and so on. But we also need to consider the long-term effects on learning as a holistic process including curiosity, motivation, engagement, social relations, mental well-being and so on (Deci & Ryan, 2012).

Research shows that more screen-time is associated with lower psychological health (Twenge & Campbell, 2018). It doesn’t matter how nicely digital tools are designed; they will always be used on a computer with a screen. Thus, an over-use of digital tools in education risks increase the psychological illness that’s already a pressing problem today.

And here, I think, we could potentially make use of a kind of long-term scaffolding aiming at designing blended-learning education holistically. Learning activities and examination cannot only be planned with respect to formal learning goals. They also need to consider the well-being of the learning, enable sustainable individual development.

When planning courses teachers should carefully consider what kinds of tools and modes of teaching will stimulate learning best, not only in the short run but also in the long run. Thus, seeing the learning as a whole. Perhaps it’s time to add an additional letter to the TPACK abbreviation? As teacher’s need the competence to view teaching and learning holistically, maybe it should be HTPACK=Holistic Technical Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

References

Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Making Human Beings Human. SAGE

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2012). Motivation, personality, and development withi embedded social contexts: An overview of self-determination theory. I R. M. Ryan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of human motivation (pp. 85–107). Oxford University Press.

Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 60-70.

Twenge JM, Campbell WK. Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Prev Med Rep. 2018 Oct 18;12:271-283. doi: 10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.10.003. PMID: 30406005; PMCID: PMC6214874.

Blended learning is all about optimizing learning environments and creating the best conditions for learners in their educational processes. And because we are humans, we cannot do without face-to-face teaching.

Even though the idea blended learning existed long before the covid-19, the pandemic has forced many teachers to teach in new ways and thus reflect on effects of various teaching styles. Not least, students have experienced online teaching and many have enjoyed not being forced to commute to campus only to sit and listen to a lecturer for 8 hours. Now, as many institutions are going back to f2f teaching it’s important to design courses optimally to retain students (Weller, 2018). The question is; do we need blended learning in theoretical subjects or could we just have online modes as default when designing courses?

To answer this question, we first need to recognize the fact that we humans are biological beings and everything we do, including learning, are influenced by physiological processes (Merleau-Ponty, 1999). Learning includes cognitive, psychological, social and cultural factors that all are affected by how our bodies are used, positioned, and experienced in relation to the environment. 

Further, learning is takes time and requires endurance, patience, and grit. Student’s need a large portion of motivation in order to engage in learning activities five days a week. Such motivation is created from social relationships, accomplishments, feelings of autonomy etc. Factors created through relations to other people (Deci & Ryan, 2012).

Knowing this, we need to recognize the holistic nature of learning in order to make learning able to learn over long periods. And in relation to this, I think blended learning has great potential. Blended learning allows flexibility when designing courses and, thus, make use of the various potentials of different modes of teaching.

Online courses certainly work well for students who have access to other physical contexts such as a workplace satisfying their basic psychological needs. For full-time programs, however, without synchronous face-to-face learning activities, students will miss out on motivational aspects such as getting to know new people, laughing together on the break, taking walks around campus etc. Only placing the body physically in a learning environment (a classroom) prepares us to learn. The commute on the way to university gives us time to mentally adjust to learning.

These activities are not banal side activities. They form the foundation of continuous learning. This said, we certainly don’t need to face-to-face education every day. Our bodies are fine spending some days at home sitting in front of the screen as well. But no matter how beautiful learning platforms or innovative applications are developed, the body will always be located in a physical space. And that is an essential part of the conditions for learning.

References

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2012). Motivation, personality, and development

within embedded social contexts: An overview of self-determination

theory. I R. M. Ryan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of human motivation

(pp. 85–107). Oxford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge

Weller, M., van Ameijde, J., och Cross, S. (2018). Learning Design for Student

Retention. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice,

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Today, collaboration has become something of a buzzword and used almost dogmatic in many professional sectors. All problems should be solved through collaboration. If organizations just could collaborate better and quit continue their ´siloed´ practices, much would be so much better. In public administration (in which I have worked for almost 10 years), sometimes the solutions itself seems to be collaboration. Of course, working together with others, finding new innovate ways of approaching ’wicked problems’ is sound and many times necessary. But when behaviors start being performed in dogmatic ways, without reflecting on why, we often seems to be missing the goal. A competent carpenter doesn’t use hammer and bolts if that’s not the best tools in relation to what is being built. The screwdriver may be a better option. 

This is also the case with collaboration in relation to achieving a task. It is always important to reflect on the purpose of collaboration prior to designing a learning activity. Perhaps this could be done individually? Maybe students could choose by themselves if collaboration is a good option here? This would be collaboration as mean.

However, the aim might also be to stimulate collaboration skills themselves. This can hardly be done in any other way than working together with others. Then, learning activities should be design in a way that stimulates collaborative skills. Student’s should, among other things, be provided with knowledge and tools to start reflecting upon collaborative practices.  This way of approaching collaboration would be collaboration as end, the goal itself.

Reflecting on the purpose of making an effort to open up education I came to think about another important aspect. Today more than ever, the quality of information and knowledge is key to a functional democratic society. Online there is an abundance of information. Information that has been created for various reasons. Lobbyists, political groups, interest groups, informal groupings and so on, create, support, and share information which may be more or less close to the truth. People making their own research from the couch should reasonable also meet accessible content created on scientific premises. Although I like the idea of the online education as the Coffee House Model (Ragupathi, 2020), I wonder if it really function this way in modern societies. One has to remember that the amount of information today is something completely different from all other epochs in history. Making information and knowledge available in material terms will only take us so far. I think learning is also about beliefs and culture. Beliefs about the value of being educated and a culture that supports and stimulates exploration of various educational domains.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led many of us to consider the conditions under which ideas may be disseminated and expressed. Putin’s government has shown that in order to carry out operations such as the war against Ukraine, popular opinion needs to be controlled. And thus also what ideas and ideas may appear in public conversation.

During Saturday morning’s running round, I put, a bit of a coincidence, on an episode of my favorite podcast “Philosophize this!“. The episode was devoted to Karl Popper’s views on totalitarianism, based on his book  Open Society and Its Enemies. The episode was published on January 16, which means that Stephen West, the creator of the podcast, had no idea how relevant the episode would be just a month later.

Apart from the fact that Popper’s description, which is based on the totalitarian forces unleashed during World War II, is terribly consistent with how Russian president Vladimir Putin seems to reason today (that the Russian society needs to be cleansed of scum and traitors for a higher purpose, etc.), Popper highlights something that got me thinking about the collaborative processes we’re engaged in the course “Open Network Learning”. Popper argues that we often tend to be too focused on the end goal, utopias, about how fantastic the end result can be. Following our entusiasm, we sacrifice important elements in the process itself and miss the value of what we learn through the collaboration itself. At a societal level, this is of course about democracy and the right to express different ideas, but from a pedagogical and learning perspective, I think it’s about taking advantage of ideas spread on our online platforms. Through these platforms, we create networks that are open to everyone who have an interest in contributing to the purpose of the network.

The course “Open Network Learning” democratizes knowledge and the assimilation of knowledge, not only within the boundaries of a particular nation state, but also for learners who are under different governing systems. Such pluralistic open networks prevent controlling of ideas and, thus, totalitarianism.

Stephen West’s work and the podcast “Philosophize This!” is in itself an excellent example of what is emphasized as part of the pedagogical basis of this course, namely openness in the educational process. The podcast is distributed freely and can be listened to free of charge by anyone who has, for example, Spotify or Acast. Transcripts from all episodes are published on the podcast’s website. The podcast is an excellent example of a learning resource that provides and democratizes learning for learners around the world and with different conditions.