The most fulfilling part of this course has been to hear from other peoples’ diverse perspectives on teaching and learning in higher education from different subjects and different countries. It has been interesting to hear experiences of how different places have adapted to primarily digital teaching methods throughout the pandemic. What I have learn is to be open to interdisciplinary conversations because this sharing of strategies and tips has been most useful. In particular, it has been great to see how different people implement digital tools into their teaching. I now have experience of using various resources such as Miro, Padlet, Slack, and WordPress, which I can certainly see playing future roles as pedagogical tools in my teaching.
I think that these kinds of digital tools can play a big part in enhancing my future course designs. I often have people do group work and come up with presentations, but this invariably ends up being a PowerPoint presentation where probably only one person made the presentation. I think that the potential for real collaboration in tools like Miro or Padlet is fantastic. It can even be done during work-from-home restrictions in a pandemic. I have also been inspired by seeing the kinds of ways other groups have presented their work at the end of each topic. There have been some great video presentations, infographics, concept maps and various other collaboratively constructed diagrams, which also have potential application for the kinds of courses I teach.
During this course, I believe I have moved more from hierarchical individual modes of learning into distributed and collective modes of learning (Elmore, 2014), and I would like to continue this in the future. I think that being able to work with things that have been of interest to everyone in my group has led to really interesting discussions, and also meant that the content ends up beings meaningful for everyone. Even though we came from diverse backgrounds, we still had a lot of interests in common. I would like to continue interacting with people in these kinds of networks because it can be quite hard otherwise to find safe spaces to explore new ideas which are not potentially considered favourable by close colleagues.
References
Elmore, R. (2014). Course material of “Leaders of learning”. Harvard Univeristy [Online]. www.edx.org
Helene
Hi,
Thanks for sharing. I agree with that understanding challenges, methods and ways of working in different parts of the world has been very interesting. Learning new tools has also been part of the journey, which has been quite an experience!