Topic 5: Lessons learnt – future practice
Those of you following this blog know that I have started this course because one of the requirements of my tenure track is to pursue pedagogy training. When I signed up back in February, little did I know that the whole education world would be forced online over night making this course more relevant than ever. Not having to teaching during this period, I was in the somewhat luxurious position to absorb all the knowledge, without being in the trenches. Now, it seems that my teaching next academic year will have to be optimized for both offline and online learning. So, now that ONL201 is done I have some time to carefully consider and implement what I’ve learnt.
Those of you following this blog also know that I usually teach topics related to digital marketing to business students. In doing so, I use quit a lot of examples and cases related to online companies and technologies. I use quite a lot of online resources (e.g., TED Talks, videos, podcasts, documentaries, articles etc.) in my lectures and in the assignments for my students. Against this background, I was pretty confident that I’m doing fairly well in terms of using online resources in my teaching. By following this course, I understood that is only partially true. The most important thing that ONL201 has taught me is that I need to also empower my students to truly collaborate online, and not just consume the online materials I curated for them.
Being part of our PBL team in this course has given me a very special perspective: that of collaborating in a team as a student. The teamwork I normally do revolves around specific tasks (e.g., writing academic papers) together with people who have very similar backgrounds and understandings of the tasks (e.g., co-authors from the same academic field). Working on the scenarios has put me again in the shoes of a student who needs to figure out what the task is and how to collaborate with a bunch of strangers to solve it. Now, I am armed with an arsenal of online tools and approaches that I know work because we have used them successfully in our team (e.g., Padlet, Coggle, Adobe Spark) and that I can offer to my students as alternatives to PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. So how about having students create infographics or mind maps to summarize the academic literature relevant for each week and support each other in studying for the exam? How about having student teams create podcasts in which they debate a particular topic rather than write a report where they discuss the pros and cons of that particular topic? And how about blogging learning reflections rather than submitting individual documents? Experimenting with these different tools and approaches will likely create additional work for me (e.g., in terms of developing and evaluating assignments), but given my ONL201 experience, I know it will be worth it!