As the first topic of the course we got presented the following scenario: “I have just signed up to do an online course and I am excited to be there. But I have little experience of online courses and it feels really challenging to get started to connect and find my way with all these new sites and tools. I guess that other participants will be more experienced than me and I feel stupid asking about things. We are asked to create a Learning blog on the web; it feels a bit scary to do this. I do share things on Facebook with friends, but here, in the open? I want to keep my private life separate from my professional life. But on the other hand, my students seem to share and discuss all sorts of things in social media and use all kinds of tools and resources.”
Funnily enough, this to be a kind turned out to be a kind of a meta-scenario, since it was actually happening to many students during the first week of the ONL course. In our problem-based learning (PBL) group the discussion turned into different ways of providing support to the students and learning in an online environment, as the person in the scenario was clearly lacking some. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model by Garrison et al. [1] and its extension by Shea and Bidjerano [2] turned out to be a great tool to reflect about the various different aspects affecting the learning experience on an online course. I was not familiar with this model before, and I am glad to have learned about it, since I think it can make the development of any course (not only online) more structured.
In the extended CoI model four key elements are identified, which support the students’ learning: (1) teacher presence, (2) social presence, (3) cognitive presence, and (4) learner presence. See our PBL group’s presentation to learn the definitions of these four different elements, and some practical ways to improve on them. Each element works together with others to enhance the learning experience, and can be improved in many different ways. It is very helpful from the point of view of my own teaching to think about concrete tools and practices to improve these elements. I have already (unknowingly) implemented some of them on my own courses, and wish to further improve each element in the future. In addition to the actual scientific research, my limited practical experience also tells me that these methods really do make a significant difference on how the students perceive the course, and how well they perform on it.
Aside from the topic itself, it was interesting to see during this first week how open-ended the ONL course is in regards to the topics we learn during the course. It was entirely up to the PBL group to decide on the topic we wanted to focus on, as long as it was somehow connected to the scenario. This is a cool feature, but unfortunately I think it wouldn’t work very well on most courses, which have more specific learning goals.
Looking forward to what the next weeks have to offer!
References:
[1] Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
[2] Shea, P., Bidjerano, T. (2010). Learning presence: Towards a theory of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and the development of a communities of inquiry in online and Blended Learning Environments. Computers & Education, 55(4), 1721–1731.
