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The topic for this week, was on  how to support and design for learning. I very much enjoyed the very hands-on approach of this topic, the clarification of different learning types and how they link to a diversity of teaching methods. I especially like the way that my group managed to make a deep-dive into the ABC curriculum design method. This is beautifully summarized here by our team member Sune.

One thing that I found interesting, and that we were unable to dig into deeper in our group, had to do with the role of emotions for collaborative learning. This was an issue that Marti Cleveland-Innes elaborated in her online seminar, and that I found very interesting and relevant for my work as both a teacher, and researcher. A lot of recommendations and analysis of how to better design our work as teachers and collaborative researchers, focuses on incentives, structures, alignment, etc (see previous topics in this course). But clearly, emotions matter a lot. Students and collaborators can get upset, frustrated, sad and disinterested in ways that effectively blocks all collaborative learning. From that point-of-view, managing emotions, and being able to get people to feel excited,  energized, optimistic about the collaboration is fundamental, very very difficult.

It was interesting to hear about some of the literature in this field of inquiry. However, one thing that I kept asking myself is whether there are less expected results in this line of research. That is, I’m not surprised that frustations hinders learning, nor that excitement is good for learning. So what is next? And what are some less expected connections between emotions and learning, that we need to keep in mind? This is certainly something I will try to find more information about for my own work.

Topic 4. Design for online and blended learning