This week on the Open Networked Learning course was when things got particularly interesting for me. This is party because my PBL group decided to collectively look at a small oline course that I am in the process of designing, as well as due to the fact that the readings and materials this week were clearly interlinked with my usual area of expertise – psychology research.
Im am currently working with developing an online course for my university, introducing the UN Sustainable Development Goals to teachers and researchers. This has been a somewhat daunting task, as I am not an expert, by any means, in online course development. This is the main reason why I enrolled on the ONL course. Thus, I was very grateful when my PBL group, with all it’s combined experise, decided to work on my course plan and content from the perspective of what we have learned on the ONL course. I obtained some very useful feedback, in part in regard to the importance of community building and socialization, in accordance with Gilly Salomon’s five stage model . Also, of particular interest in this regard for me was the comparison provided by Ameijde et al. of dropping out from education with suicide: Both are dependent on meaning-making and connection to the rest of the (educational) society.
Also, my PBL group provided me with some very useful resourses in terms of planning the content of the course in order to avoid student over-load. Indeed, both Ameijde et al. and Vaughan et al. emphasize the importance of planning blended learning, so that students have time to reflect on meaning and engage in discourse for shared understanding. These are some examples of useful suggestions that I received on my course design from my colleagues in the PBL group, but there were many others too, all of which are summarised in our group work.
Finally, in realtion to psychology, I was very interested to learn that emotions are – even in pedagogical work – regarded as primary drivers of motivation, and that metacognition is spoken of even in the field of pedagogy. Of course, these concepts are something I am very aware of as a psychology researcher and psychoterapist, but I have not bumped into such perspectives through pedagogy before.
