Pierre - Blogg

During topic 3 we were reflecting on how we can make students learning improve using group work and collaboration assignment.

I have to say that “my” group is reallt creative and during the first meetings we came up with a lot of different ideas and angels on the topic.

To try and structure the contributions we decided to use Miro and a technique called “lotus flower” were we could place the main topic in the middle and then like leafs arrange similar topics around the center. You can see our flower here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lkdyhVU=/

One subject that I personally found very interesting is the use “Cross-curricular learning (or cross-disciplinary). Mainly in projects where students from different disciplines are given a task they have to solve together. Not only does the students require knowledge within their areas, the also need to reflect on their knowledge to be able to communicate it to group members that do not have knowledge in that area. According to my experience this is a very powerful way to make the students reflect on their own knowledge.

An other topic we did discuss was how groups form ans how students (or other team members) tend to take on rolls. According to Dr Meredith Belbin’s research (Belbin, 2004), there are nine main rolls the are quite common to take on by group members which you probably will recognize if you read the definitions.

References:

M Belbin, Book Belbin Team Roles, 2004 – sheffield.ac.uk

Life is full of meetings with new people and it always feels a bit sad when you split up and continue in life. It is amazing how technology makes it possible to form distributed groups and will I honestly miss my PBL group and our weekly meetings.

During out last week we were asked to summarize the ONL course and reflect on what we have learned and how to proceed. First of all it, I think it was very interesting to take on the “student-roll” and see how online courses can be from this perspective since most of us only have had the “teacher-roll” before.

Secondly having groups formed by people both cross-curricular and from different parts of the world gives a great opportunity to be creative and come up with a lot of ideas on the topics.

Since online courses enable activities that are not possible to do in “real-environment”-classroom, some research show that using the right tools will increase student participation (Daraei, S. ,2015).

I will actually make use of quite a lot of the things we have done during the course next time I will be having an online-course on our University. I will definitely incorporate more exercises to keep student engagement, like more interaction and group work and also have more focus on the learning environment and have tasks to make the students get to know each other. I will probably also take on a more facilitator like roll when teaching and depending on which course a will teach use some more “open resources”.

In addition to this the course has also made to discover some online tools like Jambord and Mural that I had not heard about earlier.

Last I would like to thank the members of our group and our facilitator for some really interesting and inspiring weeks!

References:

Daraei, S. (2015). A Study about Effects of Facebook on Conceptual Learning Mathematics. International Journal of Future Computer and Communication, Vol. 4, No. 1, February 2015 , 77-78. http://www.ijfcc.org/vol4/360-C051.pdf

Last week we handed in Topic 4, Design for online and blended learning.

My group did choose to focus on community building and how to get the students engaged in group work. One of our group members came up with an interesting article on community building: https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-with-technology/teaching-online/community-building/

From this article we got a lot of ideas to explore. To be able to finish in time we did work in pairs on a topic from the article. I found the “social ice breakers” to be quite interesting. Especially since the main source to student frustrations in group work tends to be frustration in commitment inbalance (Capdeferro et al, 2012)

When investigating this I did find out a lot of examples how how you can do this. Some that I already was familiar with and some not. These ice breakers are most often used in the beginning of a course but in the article it is also mentioned that to get the group members to get to know each other better the ice breakers should be used continues throughout the courses (programs) since groups tend to work better if the know each other.

This time we decided to use jamboard to present our work, you can fins it here: https://jamboard.google.com/d/1GNEt6HUN_uPH9hjaP6-ehbuouYzqbDn1YR03vhW3Ba8/viewer?f=1

References:

Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.

A well needed week to catch up and analyze what we have done. Our previous topic was handed in less than a week ago, this time we used a padlet as the tool for our contribution.

Our last topic “Open learning – sharing and openness” started by a scenario that we all read individually. When I first read the scenario my first thought was, how do we define “open”. Do we mean open for everyone all over the world? Our do we mean open for application for everyone. Would the course be free of charge or would the “students” need to pay fees?

Other questions also popped up in my head, if the courses would be open for anyone… how would we then finance the costs associated with running it?

Anyway during our meeting we came up with really a lot of ideas of subject we could select. One that I thought really interesting was how our roles as teachers would evolve in a future where we can use more and more ready-material from open courses. For instance if there are really good lectures recorded in a subject that we could use. That would save us a lot of time, and what could we do with the saved time to assist the students in their learning? Maybe our role will gradually shift into being facilitators coaching the students in their learning instead of being the traditional teacher?

Today our group finished the work that begun with scenario 1. The scenario described the anxiety a teacher could have as a beginner of online teaching.

During our fist meeting we had brainstorming of how we should proceed. We came up a lot of very different ideas and decided to think about how to do until next upcoming meeting. During the two upcoming meeting we eventually decided to narrow all ideas down and only pick one, “Engagement”.

During meeting three we decided that we should make a practical list of ways to engage a student during a course. All participants did come up with at least one suggestion. Preferably one that they had tried and felt like it was working.

My contribution to the list was a recommendation to use quiz-tools like Kahoot or Menti at the end of a class or by the end of a “chapter” as “Exit tickets”. According to Paz-Albo et. al (2016) exit tickets both encourage students in their learning as well as gives teacher feedback.

My experience is that many students likes the competition part and when they know that there will be a quiz by the end of the lecture they pay more attention to the presentation. The students can of course also participate anonymously if they prefer. As a teacher you also get valuable feedback of which topics the students did find difficult and not. When having a quiz regularly during the course you get the opportunity to repeat and clarify the hard topics for the students.

References:

Paz-Albo, Jesús & Escobar, Aránzazu. (2016). Exit tickets’ effect on engagement in college classrooms. 5915-5918. 10.21125/edulearn.2016.0256.

Actually I am still amazed by the possibilities opened by technology. Even though I have been using Zoom a lot during the pandemic I am impressed the our group distributed over several continents can come together live to discuss and share experiences not only professional but also personal. This way we are already after two meetings starting to get to now each other.