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This year has been challenging in the educational sphere due to the urgent need to transfer nearly all our teaching to a scattered mesh of online formats and platforms. It has pushed many of us outside our comfort zones and towards a perpetual spiral of pedagogical compromise, but it has also triggered our inner ‘survival mode’: a state in which it has felt difficult to manage everything, let alone be creative. As an ad hoc solution I admit having used the copy & paste function last spring to move the ongoing courses to their new online homes, as there wasn’t time or energy to do more. Even if it cannot be characterized as “high-end”, well planned online education (see Cleveland-Innes & Wilton, 2018), I believe that here is still a chance to learn from the challenges faced during emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020).

Albeit stemming from the need to adjust to the new demands, something good can come out of (re)considering and (re)evaluating our own practices in depth. The current situation is likely to subside eventually, but the reflections we engage in right now will surely hold true for the future too. New ways of working, studying, completing assignments and interacting have emerged, and we might actually want to keep some aspects of that flexibility. During ONL202 I have started to think ahead, at a practical level, how to design courses for online or blended learning: how can I as an educator make learning meaningful and engaging through these contemporary mediums? The Principles of good practice for blended learning (Vaughan et al. 2013: 17) and the framework it is based on, i.e. the community of inquiry (CoI), offer a good starting point for this.

When teaching language and communication skills, the interactional setting holds specific relevance for the learning process. Especially in courses on spoken communication, my ultimate aspiration has always been to create a positive and supportive atmosphere, as it sets the whole basis and tone for peer-to-peer and whole group discussions. In this, the traditional classroom has its benefits in that it allows a multitude of ways (and spaces) to facilitate participation and engagement that is reciprocal, accumulative, genuine and spontaneous – it is through regular meetings and the affordances of physical co-presence that help the students feel at ease with each other and engaged in the learning process. As I still see that new approaches, such as that of blended learning, are something that could benefit the students greatly (we’re educating them to enter the 21st century working life, aren’t we), the question is: what aspects should be considered when planning to take the learning experience to a new level?

According to Garrison (2016), the CoI framework is based on three dimensions: social, cognitive and teaching presence, which are targeted at supporting the learner’s engagement with people, goals and content. The parts I find particularly relevant regard the ways to

  1. create a sense of “safe space” and trust via community-building activities carried out throughout the course (not just icebreakers but also other things, such as “circle time”)
  2. stimulate interaction via varying tools, activities and techniques, by which to keep students motivated and develop their conversational skills (e.g. problem-based tasks utilizing wikis or virtual escape rooms); this also involves deciding what is taught online and for which parts physical meetings are needed (see also Fiock, 2020)
  3. make learning a good experience by listening to the students and monitoring/regulating the dynamics of the learning community (cf. Vaughan et al., 2013)
  4. build a connection between the contents, topics and learners’ development; for this, needs analysis done by the students at the beginning of the course, purposeful implementation of both individual and collaborative inquiry during the course and reflection (e.g. journals, blogs) form an important core
  5. enhance learner’s autonomy and self-regulation abilities by giving freedom to choose topics or areas for inquiry and allocating tasks and responsibilities (for small groups or individuals)

Whereas these are, for now, just initial thoughts and guidelines for future practice, they still form a starting point on which something concrete could be built.

References

Cleveland-Innes, M. & Wilton, D. (2018). Guide to Blended Learning. Burnaby: Commonwealth of Learning.

Fiock, H. (2020). Designing a Community of Inquiry in Online Courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 135-153.

Garrison, D. R. (2016). E-learning in the 21st century: A community of inquiry framework for research and practice. New York, NY: Routledge

Hodges, C., Moore S., Lockee, B., Trust, T. & Bond, A. (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. EDUCAUSE review.

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press.

Designing and developing practices for online and blended learning