Uncategorized – ONL202EssiS

Personally valuable lessons learned during the ONL course

My initial reason to participate on ONL course was that…I had to. I need to perform different courses relating to teaching and pedagogy as part of my ‘teaching in higher education’ training that is mandatory for my lector’s position. ONL course was basically the only option that there was currently available in English and that’s why I chose it. From the beginning, I was pleased that this seemed to be a course that is very actual considering the recent events leading to the demand of adjusting teaching to an online or blended teaching. In addition, I was happy to find a course including international networking.

By saying that I ended up to this course by obligation, I don’t mean to say that I wouldn’t be interested in developing my teaching and pedagogy. I indeed find that as an important and even rewarding part of my job. What I find challenging is how taking a course about teaching will help me to develop my courses so that it would be worth of investing all that time and effort, instead of using those resources directly for planning and developing my courses and lectures. This challenge in mind, I have tried to reflect and apply what I have read, practiced and discussed in the ONL course to my teaching throughout the course.

The most important things that I started to pay more attention during this course relates to networking and collaborating in learning, increasing engagement to learning, paying attention to the process of learning instead of focusing only to the content learned and to the ways of inviting students to different learning contexts as persons, not just as students. All of these topics are relevant both in face-to-face and online teaching, but online context makes them more challenging when many aspects of natural communication is lost, such as receiving constant subtle feedback if student are following and maintaining interest and focus and about the general spirit in the class room.

Following I will discuss and reflect these topics and some of the ideas that I will take with me for the future teaching.

How to get more out of learning diaries?

The first thing that I changed when I got a responsibility of administrating a course, was to remove ‘a traditional exam’. I felt that exams don’t guide students to study in a beneficial way. Quite the opposite – reading for the sake of an exam, often nigh before it; trying to remember things instead of understanding and critically evaluating them. Thus, I replaced exams with a learning diary, written assignments and groups works and an ‘end seminar’ where topics of the course and students’ reflections where discussed together. That seemed to work well and students appreciated this format.

Now during this semester and inspired by this ONL course, I started to think, how could I develop these assignments in order to increase the level of collaboration in learning. Often when I read students learning diaries, I think that it is a pity if I am the only person reading them. Thus, for the next course, I will ask students to read each other’s text and to provide feedback for each other. Students will get to see what others have been reflecting, hopefully encouraging them to discuss further about the topics, and they get a chance to notice if they have understood something differently and then study that question further. One possibility could be that students work in pairs so that one student is responsible of writing a summary and a reflection of the first topic and the other is responsible of commenting and refining it, and for the second topic they would change roles and so on. I have found this kind of a collaborative writing very useful when writing research papers and funding application with colleagues, so why not to apply that to teaching as well.

How to improve social connection and engagement in learning?

During the ONL course, I made some notions about myself (as a teacher and a person in general). I noticed my tendency to be very task and performance oriented, especially in the context of strict time limitations and in online meetings, with the cost of ignoring other important aspects, such as social connection. I appreciated approaches that some other group members had to our meetings, such as starting a meeting with ‘an icebreaker’ in order to build group cohesion and met other group members as ‘persons’. That was very important notion and reflection considering my teaching in general. I made a note for myself to pay more attention to inviting students as persons to the learning situations and to pay more attention to social interaction in learning groups. This is something that happens more naturally in the face-to-face class room context, but needs some extra attention and methods on online teaching.

Accordingly, now when I plan an online teaching session, I will ask myself: 1) How could I start a session so that students feel that their presence has been noticed (by me and other members)? 2) How can I communicate for the students that their contribution is important and enable possibilities to participate actively? 3) How could I help students to engage in learning in the present learning situation?

In my previous post, I discussed about connecting learning to personal values, for example by asking students to reflect “What makes this course meaningful for me?” and “Why learning this is important to me?”. This kind of a value-based approach to teaching and learning could serve all presented questions. When students are asked to reflect their values and personal meanings, they are seen as whole persons who’s experience matter.

Learning is sharing, sharing is caring!

As a researcher my work is about constantly learning new things. Whenever I master something, I move forward to the areas that provide me with new challenges. And something that I have learned in doing this is that learning is much more efficient and much more fun together. Research is not something that one should do alone.

During my PhD studies I worked in a lovely research environment where I had many people around with the same interest in the Contextual Behavioral Science and we all were eager to learn more. We had different project, but because they were all related to the same topic, we could benefit from each other’s work and a lot of good practices for collaboration was created naturally. We worked in a same place, so asking help and pondering things together were easy. We had weekly meetings to recap the process in different projects and to solve actual problems together.

In addition to my research group, I became a member of relatively young Association of Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) that connected scientist, clinicians and students from different countries. I appreciated the community’s attitude and practices in openly sharing expertise and aiming to develop the field in collaboration. Yearly conferences provided, not only a great portion of interesting knowledge, but also an important ingredient for all learning – a bunch of inspiration. Having a feeling of belonging to a wider community with the same or similar interest and seeing others’ work has been very important part of my learning experience. It has given a sparkle to the research work that, in some normal workdays, can be dull and boring.

During my postdoc, my collaborators were mainly working in different universities in different countries. Thus, my everyday working environment was not an ideal for learning and development. I can enjoy working alone and get fused to investigating new things on my own, but I got to notice that discussions with other researchers, often in a very unformal manner, are vitally important part of the research work. Often the best ideas are created in an unformal learning situations, such as having hours long lunch discussion with colleagues by sharing ideas and being challenged to think them thoroughly.

Nowadays, I have many different learning networks that I found extremely valuable, including near and distant colleagues, but also my students. Teaching is in many ways effective way to learn which makes it motivating for me. First of all, when I need to teach something for others, I really need make it clear for myself. Second, when students’ experiences, ideas and learning processes becomes shared, I learn a lot from the students and they can learn a lot from each other too. This is something that I would like to develop further and benefit more in my teaching, i.e., how students could learn in more collaborative ways so that it becomes more efficient and more meaningful, so that the learning experience would be shared and the development of collective understanding and development would be in focus. The lessons that I have learned in doing research are good guide in this, such as creating a sense of belonging to a community with shared interest, becoming inspired by others’ ideas and work and having fun in learning together.

Openness of education for a common good

For me the question about the openness of education and knowledge is a question of equality and a promotion of a common good. Coming from Finland, I have internalized an equality as a strong value. I see that education belongs to everybody and it is a way to build better society.

In Finland, education has been free and available for everyone independent of family’s economic status. There are little differences between schools in Finland. People doesn’t need to consider which school to choose for their kids. Kids go to school that is closest to their home and people from different economical classes have been living relatively evenly in different areas.

Even university education is free and supported by the government. An idea about the education system that cost a lot of money for individuals and thus creates inequality between people feels freak and scary for me. It feels very sad to see Finland taking steps toward that direction, for example by introducing tuition fees for some international students and decreasing economic support for the students.

Considering my background, I cannot reflect the question of openness of education without thinking the values that are connected to the equal rights for everybody and a common good that can be achieved by educating people and sharing knowledge. Sharing knowledge openly feels effective and can help to fasten the development in different areas. Everybody doesn’t need to invent a wheel again, but learning can be seen as a cumulative processes.

Principles of openness, sharing and collaboration for common good happens naturally in small groups where people share the same goals and benefits of collaboration are easily visible. In bigger groups and societies other competing values and forces are often complicating things. There comes more competition between individuals and groups which can be seen as a counterforce for equality and collaboration. Nowadays knowledge and education are important resources that are competed about. Unfortunately, this competition is often run by money. Education is having a price tag and not all people can afford it which creates inequality in more and less direct ways.

Considering this global era that we live, including huge global problems and unforeseen challenges, education and an access to knowledge feels especially important. The crisis of Covid-19 has reminded us how we are all connected and how we need to find solutions together. Covid-19 has forced people all over the world to adjust their lives and forced people to make changes rapidly. One of these rapid changes is increased use of online environments, including teaching and learning environments. The familiarization with these technologies can have drastic changes in how we think and organize education. If more and more activities are taking place online, why would each school, university or a teacher produce their own materials, why should different teachers and institutions ‘invent a wheel again’, if there is an option to share materials and resources and benefit from each other’s work? It will be interesting to follow what will be the long term impact of Covid-19 to societies, including openness and collaboration in the field of education. Could this crises provoke new solutions for education that could allow more people to access knowledge and collaborate in an effective manner?