ONL212 Jon Dt

I mentioned earlier the HarvardX course I studied last year, it actually became a part of this course as well. It was the Leaders of Learning, including the Modes of Learning from Prof. Elmore. This course put a nice framework to different kinds of learning, and also looking into the future, actually slighly foreboding the massive online teaching that later actually happened.

How to use groups, preferably of people interested in the same subject, has proven to be very effective. As Elmore’s course also pinpointed, the use of collectives in different ways will probably be an important change in the future, not only using traditional “classes” in school, set only by age and geographical limitations.

One thing we have found out also, is that meeting face to face, doesn’t’ need to be in real life. Actually a Zoom meeting with two persons work perfect, if someone is traveling, or the other is feeling sick. Only when groups become bigger that around 5 people, it’s more complicated to get people to speak up and speak freely.

To summarize the ONL course in general, it has been an exciting journey. They whole idea and design is different, and it’s supposed to be so I guess. Myself had some problem navigating the whole course, and sometimes missed out on some information at first. Also the design of using groups for meeting synchronously was at first a challenge, we all had different time zones, and different works to attend to and attendance wasn’t always great. I work full time, and have sometimes problem setting times free for meetings like this.

Another challenge, what comes in all kinds of groups is how to engage yourself and your fellows. In this course this actually became a subject, and we were sort of researching the subject using ourselves as test subjects. This gave a special perspective and gave also energy to some good discussions in the group.

Looking back, I know have a better structure how to discuss the topics related to online, blended and open learning. I’m sure I will use many of the expreiences and new knowledge in the future! And one thing is for sure, we have no idea how the teaching will look like in the future.

over and out from

Jon Dahlkvist

In this topic we had a great deal of discussions over how to design modules of blended learning, focusing on the students experience. Some teaching is of course best teached face to face, and must remain like this. Discussions among people who dont know or trust each other for instance.

But some parts actually work better in an online setting, pure information and knowledge transmission for instance. Here you can get higher attendence to courses and especially with recorded material, students have more choice to when and how they will take in the knowledge.

Me myself I have greatly enjoyed many online courses during the pandemic, and that I can listen to podcats while walking in the forest, or listening to important videos after kids fell asleep at night. The possibility to learn when you want to learn, asynconous teaching, is much more appeling to me than only using classroom setting where everyone has to learn in an institution at the same time in the same way. All people are different and we like to learn different. For me, for instance, I learn from spoken word better when walk, than when I sit still on a chair. Maybe others are different, but I believe there are others like me around the world.

Our group presentation became a recorded video meeting of ca 1 hour, where we presented pre-decided questions with “thewheelofnames.com”.

As teaching has been conducted online last year, most teachers have been asking themselves: “How do I engage the students?” and “How can I make the collaborate online?”

This is a very hard topic, and many teachers have worked hard on this, with divided results on most cases. Our dicussions in the group where of course very spread, but we managed to sort them in to a Lucid Flowchart:

Our group wrote: “The Flowchart should be a kind of “guide” to create the preconditions for students’ engagement in group works and make them recognize the benefits of participating in PLN”

Especially recognizing the different methods, and how to let the students themselves find out how to use engagement can greatly change both individual and group outcome, was most interesting in my view.

The online teaching has one strong possibility in teaching: Openness. For me, when the pandemic hit, already the second week I was inscribed in several online courses, including one very interesting course on leadership in teaching environments from Harvard University. It was actually for HarvardX, the platform for MOOC, Massive Open Online Courses, where thousans of persons can inscribe at the same time. I felt this was an amazing oppurtunity to learn more, and was positively surpriced so many other persons around the world, could do the same thing at the same time. This is to strong positive side of Openness, the possibility to bring knowledge to a vast number of people in a well designed setting online.

In our group, we had good discussions on openness, and on privacy. And soon we found out, we are not so different in these matters. Even though our group had mostly Scandinavian participants, all members of the group agreed on that privacy is of great importance.

We decided to focus on two specific topics related to openness and sharing; How to open our your courses and how you can introduce openness to your students. The result became a mind map, nicely graphical presenting our thoughts on the matter:

Supportive literature

David Wiley, Cable Green: Why openness in education? https://press.rebus.community/idsconnect/chapter/why-openness-in-education/

Creative Commons

OER Commons

Casserly. C.M & Smith, M.S. (2008). Revolutionizing education through innovation: can openness transform teaching and learning?

Jordan, Katy and Weller, Martin (2017). Openness and education: a beginner’s guide. Global OER Graduate Network.

http://oro.open.ac.uk/53028/

Sandanayake, T.C. Promoting open educational resources-based blended learning. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 16, 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0133-6

Wiley, D. (2006). Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 3(1),. Retrieved October 28, 2021 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/104321/

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Vivien Rolfe. Striving Toward Openness: But What Do We Really Mean?

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3207/4445

Choudhury, B.R. (2018). Openness in Higher Education through Open and Distance Learning Environment. (8) Openness in Higher Education through Open and Distance Learning Environment | Request PDF (researchgate.net)

The pandemic put all our teaching online for a prolonged time. This enormous change of education put a thousands of challenges, and made teachers all over the globe to rethink their ways of teaching. Now, one and a half year later, all teachers have actually done it. We did put teaching in online setting, for better or worse. We did change all the ways of giving lectures, of lending in works, of meeting and discussing online together.

Now is perhaps the point of putting the really interesting question: What has the pandemic taught us? What methods and ways of thinking should we bring on and implement in the future?

But to start, this first weeks is about our individual mark online, and our digital footprint. I have always seen myself as a pretty digital savvy person, using computer from the age of 7,doing basic programming from age 10 already. I would probably use the term Native user, to use Prensky’s term. But this being said, I still had a hard time adapting to the new normal, with working online and finding new ways to connect to people. A year of experimenting simply.

The first weeks of ONL is now ended, and I starting to understand the rather new way of working together, with the course completely online on a website and forums, and two Zoom meetings every week discussing the content and producing group output. Listening to David White’s seminar made me think of how active your are in a digital world, if you just stay passive and listen and learn, or if you engage more frequently.

We had a very intersting discussion in our group about what kind of platform to use in online meeting, social media for instance. We decided to dig in to popular platform for connecting with people like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Blog and Podcasts, and how to use them for best output. This was mainly a group effort, where we were pretty aligned in the group on how to use different media in different ways.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Michael Todorovic, Elisabeth Coyne, Vinod Gopalan, Youn Oh, Lila Landowski & Matthew Barton (2020) Twelve tips for using Facebook as a learning platform, Medical Teacher, DOI: 10.1080/0142159X.2020.1854708
2. Nitza Davidovitch, Margarita Belichenko (2018) Using Facebook in Higher Education: Exploring Effects on Social Climate, Achievements, and Satisfaction, International Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 7, Nr. 1, 2018, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v7n1p51
3. Sheeran, N., Cummings, D.J. An examination of the relationship between Facebook groups attached to university courses and student engagement. High Educ 76, 937–955 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0253-2
4. Chugh, R., Ruhi, U. Social media in higher education: A literature review of Facebook.Educ Inf Technol 23, 605–616 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-017-9621-2
5. Toker, S., Baturay, M.H. What foresees college students’ tendency to use facebook for diverse educational purposes?. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 16, 9 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0139-0
6. Johannesen, M., Mifsud, L. & Øgrim, L. Identifying Social Presence in Student Discussions on Facebook and Canvas. Tech Know Learn 24, 641–657 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-018-9362-3

I’m very much looking forward to follow the ONL212 Course. These years of pandemic has shown that there are new ways of organizing education, using online methods, and new ways to meet from different places on the globe. Perhaps this course will be a door opener to new ways to learn and teach.

/ Jon Dahlkvist