This topic has been most favorite for me due to interesting discussions we had in the group on how to engage students. I felt I have been growing quite a lot in terms of knowledge acquired both by the literature and related events but mostly by my group members who have much more experience than me in teaching. In particular, I have really appreciated the suggestions from them on how to engage students and how to increase the efficiency of my future work in teaching.

First of all, I had to mention that at the beginning I did not fully understand from the literature what community of inquiry means. But I have found an interesting explanation that connect the concept to the parabola of the blind men [1]. This example has made things really clear. Not only for understanding the concept, but mostly has enlighten me on how to organize future teaching activities. Especially in large group of students, it is important to split them in small groups and facilitate the building of a community of inquiry. Talking with my group members, I got interesting hint on how to create a community of inquiry in large groups. One of this is to create a forum where the students instead of asking me directly the questions by email, ask the question to the community: the students first and then me. I will for sure implement such strategy because it actually boost collaboration, engagement and also reduce the amount of email I received in my email account :). What I really liked from this topic and from our group discussion on this topic is to come up with practical examples to be implemented in our teaching activities. One of our team member shared this reference [2] in the FISH document. It is a kind of to-do list for good teaching in online environment. I will print it out and put in my desk as a remainder for the future teaching life.

We went through the Salmon´s five stage model [3] and we spent quite a lot of time on the online socializing. We all agreed that socializing is a key aspect for enhancing engagement and productivity in whatsoever learning environment. I have shared with my colleagues my frustrations about engaging and interacting with students in today´s online lectures. We have thus discuss quite a lot on how to actually start socializing in online environments. Some of my colleagues shared their own experiences and examples and I will try them in the future. I have also found some others here at this reference [4]. While sharing my frustrations as a teacher, I got several hints from my team members on how to organize lectures to increase interactions. Most of my frustrations shared with my colleagues are due to the fact that since we moved on-line due the COVID19, it is quite boring to give lectures. All the students are attending the lectures with the camera off. It is very difficult to get questions on-line. Most of the students do not interact on-line. Most of them they just send email afterwards. It is a kind of weird situation. One colleague suggested to record the lecture, upload it in Canvas and then just having the lecture for discussion. I will follow this strategy in the future.

References

[1] https://rutraining.org/2013/09/02/six-blind-men-and-an-elephant-why-we-need-learning-communities/

[2] https://sleguidance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BL/pages/36962474/Online+facilitation+techniques#app-switcher

[3] Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model. [Homepage] http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

[4] https://museumhack.com/virtual-team-building-for-remote-teams/