At the moment I only teach campus courses but I have experience with online courses as well, but that was some years ago, when technology wasn’t as good as it is now, and also I think that I lacked knowledge of the opportunities given by technology.

During this topic I have read up on the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison et al, 1999), and we have talked about it in my PBL group. As we have understood it we should be very happy if our classes could be considered as communities of inquiry, but for a higher level of learning to take place we should work on these different aspects of the CoI framework; social presence, cognitive presence and teacher presence. And as Martha Cleveland-Innes (2019) puts it, maybe we should also think about the emotional presence.  

Thinking about these aspects of the CoI, I think I work on all of them in my courses, but I could do a lot more. I have quite traditional lectures where I instruct a lot. Even though I try to engage my students with examples, giving them exercises to work with, asking them questions, a lot of the time it is me talking. Could technology help me with this? Should I record lectures instead and work more with exercises and discussion in class? The idea of that is appealing. But as a student in this online ONL course, I feel that when I watch the ‘instruction videos’ I am not as good a student as I would be in a classroom. I don’t take notes and I easily get distracted. So I guess I am little bit afraid that this is the result I will get. Students coming to class, but not having the definitions clear. But maybe I am just a dinosaur?

In my PBL group we have talked a lot about transformative learning. What it is and how we achieve it. As I understand it, we can talk about transformative learning as something that happens when students change their mindsets and their beliefs (see e.g. this review by Jackson and Chakraborty on transformative learning). When thinking about that I wonder if my students ever get there from a single course. And it is a bit intimidating thinking that my students should be transformed by my teaching I believe that studying economics in general will change students’ mindsets and their beliefs, but I don’t know if a single course results in that. Maybe we should hope that a single course gives some input to that transformation, but that it is a whole programme, or at least a set of courses that results in transformative learning.

This topic has given me aspects to think about that not necessarily has to do with the setting of the teaching (face-to-face, blended or online) but more of the general structure of my courses. And I think that we always have to start with asking ourselves what it is the students are supposed to learn. Then we ask how we best can help them to learn this. If the setting is online, then we only have that to work with, but if the setting is campus education, then we have all the tools of the physical face-to-face and all the possibilities of online tools, so that we can have some setting of blended learning. And there we should really think about the purpose of using different tools, and in what way it enhances learning. I will keep on thinking about this, and how my students can learn more.

Cleveland-Innes, M. (2019). Emotion and learning –  emotional presence in the Community of Inquiry framework (CoI)? , Accessed 2019-11-19. https://athabascau.adobeconnect.com/pyx24rifa1yw/?proto=true

Garrison, D.R, Anderson, T. and W. Archer (1999) “Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education”, The Internet and Higher Education, Vol. 2, issues 2-3, pp. 87-105. Accessed 2019-11-26. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751600000166

Jackson, P. and M. Chakraborty (undated) “Transformative Learning in the Online Learning Environment: A Literature Review”, Masters and Doctoral Submission, Texas A&M University. Accessed 2019-11-26. https://www.ufhrd.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Porscha-Jackson.pdf