The forth
topic is Design for online and blended learning. This is the topic I have been
looking forward to the most. This one feels most hands on and most urgent. Unfortunately
I have been very busy with other obligations during these two weeks, and I somewhat
lost the thread.

The required reading included a presentation by Gilly Salmon. She is presenting a scaffold for designing an online course. The stages are kind of obvious; stage 1 Access and motivation, stage 2 Online socialization, stage 3 Information exchange, stage 4 Knowledge Construction and stage 5 Development. However, the reality often is the obvious. Why make it more complicated than it has to be?

This ONL
course is clearly designed based on this scaffold, both the course as a whole,
and each topic separately. In our PBL- group for this topic, we focused on evaluating
our courses (or single sequences) from a student perspective, by filling an
empathy template. We tried to put ourselves in the students’ situation and empathize
with what they think, feel, say, do, see, and hear during the learning
environment. The observations could work as guidance for identifying which
aspects of the teacher presence, learning prerequisites, atmosphere or communication
needs development or re-thinking. Honestly, I must say, it was more difficult
than I thought to fill out the empathy template. It was helpful to read what
the other group members had written, in order to understand my own situation better
and deeper.

Due to
other engagements, this topic is the one I had the least time to get involved
with, which is a pity since I had high expectations. I would have liked to get
even more hands on tips on how to design online and blended learning. Therefor I
am happy the ONL course itself is so well designed, as the course itself is a
lesson in how to design and communicate a course. Naturally, you have to design
learning with the student in focus, and the empathy exercise we did in our
group is a start for that process.

One of my group members told us about and shared the ABC-method (Arena Blended Connected). It is a method to sum up what the core of the course is, and then develop the pedagogy and increase the variety of activities you use as learning methods. It is very inspiring and I am a little bit sad about the fact, that our institution is rather small, and I don´t have that many colleagues on campus (teaching same subjects that I am), to do work-shops around our courses together with. However, I am definitely going to have a look at the ABC-method when I start planning the next semester.   

The resources
for topic 4 are in general also material I am going to return to many times after
this course.