I started this blog in September at the start of the Online Networked Learning course and I have one week to go. It’s been a long haul, but worth it, especially these last two weeks where we worked on program design. I think I can say I am «lost, found AND searching» all at the same time.

During these two weeks we have discussed Gráinne Conole’s article The 7 Cs of learning design and Vaughn, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison’s Teaching in Blended Learning Environments.

Conole’s article lays out seven steps and aspects of creating a curriculum under the mnemonic the 7 C’s: Conceptualize, create, communicate, collaborate, consider, combine and consolidate. These reflect the process a teacher goes through to design a course that is student centered, rather than content centered. And while it might be easy to think, «yeah, yeah – is this so new?» its importance crystallizes in light of our shared experiences of living and learning almost entirely online since Covid-19 made its appearance.

The ability for teachers to sense whether or not a student is «present» in the classroom or not, that particular stillness that draws your attention to someone who is present in body only, is not easily accessible when all contact depends on interactions through a computer or telephone. Drawing your students in and holding them together long enough to exchange knowledge and get a sense of how they are doing, both academically and otherwise, is as difficult as getting a butterfly to land on your hand. This is where the 7 C’s become essential for teachers to re-discover and articulate the steps they are making to create student-centered online curriculum.

My beau is an early music professor, specializing in «practice performance» (how do we know HOW for example baroque music was actually performed in the 1700’s when there are no recordings). Like all music professors and teachers, teaching online courses has been particularly challenging this year. He’s a natural teacher and I love eavesdropping on his sessions. I’m going to go out on a limb here and apply the 7 Cs to a recent lesson he designed. First he had to conceptualize what the students needed to achieve: understanding how to use a specific music app, but also experiencing that trying and failing in front of others is as important as trying and succeeding and succeeding in front of others. He then had to create appropriate learing activities, which he did by asking each student to make a recording using the app they were expected to learn (it was an app that provided a rythmic baseline). This was followed by communicating and considering – here somewhat entwined. The students uploaded their recordings, and then listened to each others» work, and students and teacher alike responded and reflected together on the process and the result. Collaborating is missing in this particular exercise – but it is possible to imagine that maybe some of the students join forces at a later date to practice more improvisation together, using the music app. He then combined his views on how the exercise had gone, his own reflection, how his students responded – did they achieve what he had hoped? Did the technoglogy work? And finally, he can consolidate his experience by revising this particular exercise before running it again.

I guess what really grabbed my attention when he talked about planning this class and eavesdropping on his comments to the students during the class (ahh – home offices…) was his goal to let students experience failing, because this brings me to the Community of Inquiry.

The particular lesson I am referring to was only one in a semester long course, and it is a good thing that this lesson was late in the course, because daring to take a chance, daring to fall flat on your face is really only something you can do if you trust the people you are with. Vaughn, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison discuss the three presences in a community of inquiry: social, cognitive and teaching, and all of these presences appear in the teacher’s conscious choice to give students the opportunity to «fail» – although «fail» is really not the correct term at all. Explore is so much better. Virtual social presence is created by choosing varied ways for both students and teachers to both present and represent themselves. Perhaps it is easier for music students to create a social presence than for example, art history students. Their choice of instrument and their style of playing says something about who they are, and many have soundcloud and youtube channels as well. Challenging students to record an improvisation based on a comp provided by a music app is most certainly what Vaughn, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison call a «triggering event» – something that forces a cognitive, and perhaps also an emotional process- thus creating a cognitive presence. And finally, the discussion that follows listening to the recording, provides a teaching presence on many levels – both peer to peer and student to teacher. The teaching presence, though, can only fulfill its role if the learning environment is safe, if the social presences are authentic – in other words, if the students and the teacher can be themselves, share their frustrations and uncertainties and help each other work through them.

I started this post saying I was lost, found and still searching – and this is why: I have found some theories I feel I can use in creating virtual exchanges, I am lost in the respect that teachers who haven’t had the time or space to learn about curriculum design for online learning are utterly exhausted and probably don’t want to hear another word about how great online learning can be, and I am searching for a way to nudge these teachers in the right direction. We need online courses no only in a pandemic situation, but also to address accessibility and reduce the environmental impact of travel. Perhaps the way forward is to show teachers how their design is already so close to the 7 C’s that all it takes is a little tweaking?