In my previous blog entry I mentioned that I have just taught a course “where more than half the participants have invaluable experience and expertise (practitioners working on sustainability issues from different sectors)”. This is because at my business school, we welcome each year 40 new participants in our 2-year study module on ‘Corporate Responsibility’: a number of external students, most of whom are professionals whose work relates to social responsibility and sustainability from different perspectives. I also wrote in that blog entry that “it is a pity that the reflections they produced could not be read and commented upon by other participants, it could have enriched the learning a great deal”. In particular, an interesting discussion that started on the chat of one of my sessions comes to my mind, when several NGO professionals started reflecting on a question I asked about accountability relations with different stakeholders for civil society organizations. When briefly engaging with the comments that the 3 or 4 NGO-based participants were exchanging then, I realize it would be really important to facilitate in the course deeper discussions on topics that are particularly relevant to the participants on their own terms.
Thinking about this example, then, what could I do to facilitate and enhance the expert participants’ learning possibilities on a course like this one? A first step could be to opt for a more connectivist model and ask all participants to write and comment on learning blogs as part of the mandatory course activities. But thinking further in terms of Personal Learning Network (PLN) and how to help students enhance their own PLNs both within a course and beyond it (Oddone et al., 2019), I am now considering also (or as an alternative to learning blog duty for all individual participants) asking them to initiate discussions on topics of joint interest (meaning, interest shared with at least 2-3 other participants), perhaps as a project of collaborative learning throughout the course. This would entail some early sessions where people share which key issues they are interested in learning about (and/or finding new solutions to), and then form communities of practice and/or interest (Wenger, 2010) in which they will be active throughout the course. The ONL course is giving me some ideas on how to design this for later iterations of my courses.
Beyond the individual courses though, I am also thinking of the 40 participants in the study module mentioned above. They have access to networking possibilities through some of our tools, but we could go further in designing an online community of practice and interest that lives on after the students have acquired their study package from us. Since I co-organize the study module together with two colleagues, I vouch to look into the possibility of developing the study module community along those lines, for helping the participants in their continuous development of not only their own PLNs, but also (lifelong?) collaborative learning opportunities. This sounds like a worthy endeavour when dealing with communities of professionals who are seeking to transform various business and societal practices in a more sustainable direction.
References
Oddone, K., Hughes, H., & Lupton, M. (2019). Teachers as connected professionals: A model to support professional learning through personal learning networks. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 20(3).
Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London.
