Aiming for the forest
When I signed up for this ONL course, I was thinking about connecting my students with other students in different parts of the world.
I teach a module on workplace communication skills to undergraduate students. Most of my students are local Singaporeans. In some semesters, I get international students in my class, and I realised that those classes are especially enriching because the international students share valuable cross-cultural communication insights and this generates a lot of discussion and learning. I therefore wanted to explore how to bring the world into my classroom. Although Zoom has now made it easy to connect with anyone in the world, I do not have the right contacts nor sufficient know-how to effectively set up such learning experiences. I was hoping that by going through this course, I might not only experience how this can be done effectively but also have the opportunity to perhaps strike up future collaborative efforts with colleagues around the world to bring the world into my classroom.
Lightbulb moment
But this morning’s conversation with my colleagues, Alan Soong, who is also a facilitator on ONL231, and Wan Yun, who is a fellow participant in ONL231, made me realise that I’ve been missing the trees for the forest.
They helped me realise that I could also apply the ONL concept of building online learning communities to my internship students in another module as well. In this internship module, I meet with each student individually for only 3 times throughout their internship, My role as a communication skills lecturer is to support them in their internship journey by helping them navigate interpersonal communication challenges at work, and helping them with their internship report writing and oral presentation. I meet with each student individually and the students do not connect or see each other. A challenge that I’ve always had in this module is that the students often come to me with questions that are not in my power to address and I have to direct them to the department that is coordinating their internship.
Connecting the trees
What Alan and Wan Yun helped me realise is that I could set up online communities for these students so that they could connect with each other and support each other, and share their internship experience with each other.
I am stumped why this has not occurred to me before, and I’m now excited to try it out!
