So this is my final reflection of the Open networked learning course that I have participating in. I have a couple of reflections that I want to share.
The team
Collaborating in a cross functional team that is from all over the world, the participants was mostly from the Nordic countries but we also had participants from Singapore and Australia. I also really liked that the team was so diverse, we had members from health, teachers in a high school and engineering. This is something that I really appreciate when reading a course. I often meet and talk with people within my own area, both locally, national and international. But I seldom have the opportunity to collaborate with people from all over the world from another research area.
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| My team in the course |
The facilitator
During the course, we had a facilitator – Alan that really helps us with the course and facilitated especially the early steps in the course. what to do, expectations, how to meet etc. That was something that was very smart. I think that this distributed approach is very nice and it worked very well. During the five phases in the course, We always had a leader (one of the members in the team) and Alan helped the leader to manage and organised meetings in a nice way (we used WhatsApp to coordinate meetings, etc).
The local team
At LTU we also had a local team with participants from different parts of LTU, we had an introduction meeting with Karin (also co-facilitator) that also was helpful to understand the course, requirements and expectations. we also had a couple of meetings in parallel with the ordinary teams, and it was interesting to discuss how our respective teams were collaborations.
The content
The content of the course was interesting, and it was uncanny that as soon as I started to read this course we had to switch remote teaching because of the Coronavirus. so that was also giving me an opportunity to implement and test a lot of the ideas directly in my courses.
I have not explicitly worked with Problem Based Learning in the strict sense before, I have used part of it, but I think it was interesting to do a deeper dive into the underlying pedagogical ideas.
Open learning is something that I feel is important, and I would love to work with it more. I think that it is something that I will try to implement more in my courses. It is also fun to see that the
Zoom introduction for students that I created and shared via Canvas Commons has already been downloaded 25 times.
Blended learning is also an area that I really like and try to use in my courses, and I challenged me a bit to come up with new ways to do things, like
oral distance examination,
virtual poster exhibition,
facilitated peer review, video pitches etc. One thing that the course focused on emotions and how to create a social presence in the course and that encouraged me to ask the students (in my courses) how they felt.
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Emotions from students in one of my courses,
they were ordered to create afterschool with their team! |
We also played games on distance (Mentimeter has a nice online game similar to Kahoot), used humour to create a bit more fun lectures.
When coronavirus attack in your zoom lecture.
Another thing that was very good was that we should reflect on others reflections, in this course each participant should reflect over each topic in a blog post. And then we should write at least 1-2 comments on other posts. For learning I think that it is essential that we reflect, and in this case we can also see that others has others learning experiences.
Tools
In the course, we had the opportunity to test a lot of tools that are useful in networked learning, I had used most of the tools we used in the course before, but some of the tools were new to me like
Flipgrid,
Imageflip,
Genially,
Pictochart and
Canva. The tools we used most in my team was
Mural, one of my favourite tools for co-located work. We used it in almost all phases in the course, for creating an understanding of what to do, place reference material, give feedback, brainstorm, and also
create the final presentations.
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| Mural from our team (Topic 4) |
I wish
One tool that I often use is the I like… I wish… reflection, the things above is mostly I like part of my reflection/feedback. What I wish for when improving the course for next time is that they really think on how to improve the ‘live meetings’ with all students (webinars etc) the teamwork and the over all content is very nice. The live sessions did not feel as professional as the rest of the course. I think that they could really improve this part and integrate the Mentimeter questions in a better way to activate us a bit more now the lecture was mostly focus on us listening and not that much feedback, this reminds me that a flipped approaches is not automatically a road to success as Jensen et al. highlighted in a study.
“that the flipped approach offers no additional benefits to student learning over a nonflipped, active- learning approach.” (Jensen et al. , p. 11).
Final conclusions
I think I may have been a bit overqualified for this course, but I really like the deeper theoretical discussions about PBL and blended learning. and also the ideas and insight I got from the members of my team. To summarise it, very well spent time and I also had a fun time. Will definitely add the meme generation as a part of at least one of my courses in the future.
My final ‘meme reflection’
References
J. L. Jensen, T. A. Kummer and P. Godoy, “Improvements from a flipped classroom may simply be the fruits of active learning,” CBE— Life Sciences Education, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015.
