12 weeks with the ONL course is coming to an end. I have really appreciated this course. It has been a lot of work and we have had to deal with a shrinking PBL group, but we have had a lot of interesting discussions, and I have been introduced to different online tools that I didn’t even know existed.
Thinking of other pedagogical courses I have taken, one thing that always comes out of these is this notion that students have to be active in the learning process, and not just passive listeners (see e.g. Biggs and Tang (2007)). I work on that continuously but I think I could do a lot more. In this course I have really enjoyed coming into contact with a lot of different online tools and I have been thinking about how I can apply some of them in my own teaching. But what it often boils down to, is that I get ideas of learning activities that could just as well be performed on paper, or by students discussing with their neighbor, or raising their hands. But could an online tool be more fun for the students? Will they appreciate that, and thinking that the course is “up to date”? I don’t know.
During spring this year I introduced game playing using a mentimeter in one of my courses. I have to say that I wasn’t entirely content with the outcome of it myself and wouldn’t do it in the same way again (maybe just a shorter version of the game), but my hope was partly that the students would appreciate doing something else than having a normal lecture. In the course evaluations some students expressed appreciation, but some just thought it was a waste of time. So sometimes I think that students expect to just go to the lecture and listen, and don’t like when they should do something different. We often have specific exercise sessions in the courses at my department, and the turn up of students at these sessions is almost always lower than at the lectures. So I think that there is also a responsibility for us as teachers to explain to our students why we do different things, and how we learn. I try to do that, but I could probably do more.
During this course I have collected a list of different online tools that can be used, so that I don’t forget about them, but new tools keep emerging and others become obsolete, so how can I keep up? We talked about this in my PBL group and I got the tip of following Alastair Creelman’s blog where he is looking around in the world to see what’s happening on this topic. So I will definitely do that.
I will not keep blogging or tweeting (I only did my one mandatory tweet) but I will remember the things I have learnt in this course. I will probably go back to my blog posts to see what I was thinking about during the course and I will use some of the tools that I have tried during this course in my own teaching.
References
Biggs, J. & Tang, C. (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University. McGraw-Hill/Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press.
