The last two weeks Erik and I was moderators in our BPL group. The fear of not have anything to show in the end was hanging over our heads, but luckily, it did not happen. Another PBL group member, Anamaria, came up with the idea to use SWAT analyses to deepen our understanding of how open learning could be used and affected our individual professions. in our individual professions. It worked out fine and my SWOT looked like this:
My SWOT, analyzing what open learning means in my teaching context
I think it is easy to see that more openness in education and to use open learning has many benefits, for example, the education will be more inclusive and there will be more perspectives that are diverse in the classroom. When I look into practice-based learning, the area I teach, some things will be quite easy to do, like sharing lectures or films showing how to do different techniques. Next step in the learning process, to apply the knowledge, will put more pressure onto the student. Often this part is workshop studies with lots of in person tutoring (= time consuming and expensive). How to give the students the feedback they need to develop their work? One way can be to use peer tutoring, where the students will tutor each other in groups. Still I think to get quality and to challenge students in their work needs some tutoring from the teacher and the teacher also have to put in some work to get the peer tutoring to work, so the students really interact with each other in a fruitful way. When viewing some MOOC educations, I also saw in the comments that students miss feedback. https://www.classcentral.com/course/edx-circular-fashion-design-science-and-value-in-a-sustainable-clothing-industry-17080
We made one swot to summarize all the individual once. We found that we had many similarities like most of us thought that more openness would benefit the students and our worries was how to fund open learning and how to keep up quality in our educations. In our group we finished our work with individually list what we needed to do to be able to teach more open within two years. That was a good way to get grasp of the topic and see possibilities. This is my list:
- decide what level of openness is possible/ wanted and in what kind of courses
- learn to film and edit film properly
- find a feedback system that is safe and ensure quality
- write a course syllabus with openness/ sharing guidelines, goals and objectives
- be brave! (look for role models and inspiration)
We have learnt to know each other more in the group and that definitely helped when trying to do team work, but it was a bit challenging, but interesting to moderate. This is some things I have thought of while doing the collaborative moderating with Erik: How to get the whole group engaged in the topic? How to choose what way to go? Have we worked enough? How to not put too much pressure on the individual group member to perform, but still get material from each of us to continue work with? When stop research widely and narrow down, to be able to do a presentation?
