Photo: Jason Goodman, Unsplash

In the third topic it was my and a colleague’s turn to moderate our PBL group’s work. We worked as equal moderators though my role was officially a co-moderator. I had recently been in facilitator training held by Mukamas learning design and was eager to try the methods I’d learned there.

The title of the topic was Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning. So that’s exactly, what ONL itself is all about! In the scenario, we had a case that led us to think about the course or task design that would lead to a real collaboration (even between courses) instead of traditional group work. By that I refer to a situation where one member of the group does the search, another writes the slides and the third presents the results. We started looking for something deeper.

Real collaborative thinking requires trust between group members and a psychologically safe atmosphere in a class. Teachers from pre-school to secondary school are perhaps more used to different kinds of group activities that build a sense of community than teachers in higher education. In higher education courses are usually filled with more “real contents” than other activities. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many students have reported feelings of loneliness. An obvious answer to that is working in small groups. That has led to multiple different group works in different courses and in different teams. After the spring semester of 2021, many students were tired of doing new group work. Teachers were forced to think about supporting students in grouping in new ways to make work more collaborative and rewarding.

Of course, now it has been necessary to do all the activities in distance mode. It requires a little extra thinking but is fun and easy after all. I have been teaching in one teacher education course this autumn and my subject is educational technology. The main emphasis was on the support of collaboration in remote teaching with different digital tools.  If interested, you can take a look at a part of the material I shared in the course. Some content is common, some more course/institution related.

To get back to the ONL topic 3 and our PBL group’s work, we used a lotus blossom method to collaborative knowledge building through these two weeks. I first thought that we would use it only at the beginning of the topic, but the group was willing to continue working with “flowers” so after all we did our final submission based on the original blossom iterations. It turned out a great way to open up our thinking to others as well as the process we had during two weeks. 

This lotus blossom method is one of the things I’ve implemented after the facilitation course I mentioned earlier. I have also used it in teaching and it showed me that the material I share with students doesn’t have to be the presentation material but can be more like additional material with links and some notes. Students brought up the right details in discussions anyway and all the things I had planned were covered. I wrote about this in the previous post as well.

The facilitation process in topic 3 was very instructive for me and it also encouraged me as a teacher. During these weeks I’ve started to consider converting my teaching to PBL format, too. Let’s see if I can get others in my teacher team excited about this too!