I guess I have been doing my 10.000 hours in course planning and teaching. Traditional, blended and fully online. I have now with ONL put some extra hours to those first 10.000. Some very interesting extra hours.

The Community of Inquiry framework (CoI) was a new introduction to me and I find it a very useful descriptive tool to my teaching experience. Within CoI my thoughts circled mostly around the Social Presence, which in short points to the necessity of feeling part of a context, a shared sense of meaning and the many cognitive process within human synchronous interaction. I realize that this is the perspective where some critics towards Constructive Alignment (CA) have been expressed. You cannot plan for all (CA) – you need headroom for social aspects and relational fluctuation. Well, at least the Social Presence needs a special treat beyond goals and activities.

In my group we decided to work around a case which was a real course development project from one of our members. We had interesting discussions on several aspects of learning transactions such as peer group construction, tools for blended learning etc. But we also brought up some knowledge about how to nurture the Social Presence as a side effect of, for example, assignements. A peer-review assessment brings peers closer than a teacher assessment, and a group discussion may support the social presence better than turning in a paper while staying at the same level of reflection. I am curious about the final version of the course as we left it in a brainstorming state.

We also discussed the development of blended learning courses from an institutional point of view. A brief survey informed the group on how few actually have gotten devoted time to develop a course, but also as some universities do have strategies to develop their educations through project fundings and educations for teachers. Hopefully this is the top of a bigger change where the growth of OER may ease the developing process.

A while ago I started collecting articles on humor in teaching and learning as a just-for-fun project together with a friend. The idea was simply to learn more about the role of humor in a learning process. While managing to collect and pile articles I have so far only managed to brief myself on their content. But it tentatively points towards humor as a strong socializing effect, but also the thin line humor is to balance many people on at the same time. Of course you do not build a course only around humor, but it may for sure be one tool for social presence.

References:
Biggs, J., Tang, C. (2011) Teaching for quality learning at university
Garner, R. (2006) Humor in pedagogy: How Ha-Ha can lead to Aha!
Garrison, D. R. (2017) E-learning in the 21st century
Vaughan, N., Cleveland-Innes, M., Garrison D. (2013) Teaching in blended learning environments
Wickström, J. (2015) Dekonstruerad länkning (Deconstructed alignment)