The forth topic started with an inspiring seminar with Martin Weller. He shared his long experience of making online courses at Institute of Educational Technology at the UK Open University. He talked about different aspects of course design and shared tips and tools for how to get the learning process active. The UK Open Universities website is filled with helpful course design tips, templates etc. that I definitely will use in my future course planning http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/learning-design/?page_id=457
It is interesting to get perspective, online teaching have been going on for long time, even though I did not start teaching online until 1,5 years ago. I started out of necessary, due to the covid situation. I have learned that what I experienced can be called “emergency remote teaching” and differs a lot from online teaching (Hodges, C. et.al 2020). The experience I had in the start was panic solutions and attempt to patch up something unwanted, not a well thought through course design for online learning. From that start it have taken me some time to change my mindset from my norm, that design and material based artistic work only can be taught in person on campus, to widen my insight both in what the topic actually are to how it can be learned.
In my PBL group we used our bad experience when we started explore how to do well working online course design. We all have had bad, as well as good, experience of online learning. That is not specific for online learning, all of us have of course experienced the same in campus teaching. When we looked into how to do good online course design we identified 5 important “factors” for a successful wholeness; educators, students, technology, time and economy. We talked a lot about interaction, engagement and learning styles. We called our presentation “The journey of designing a learning process”. It is a good name, this course have been a journey and sharing experience and thought have been one of the highlights of the trip. It is interesting how similar experience we have in the group, even though we work in different areas of learning and with very different topics. One thing we all deal with is how to get interaction with all involved in a course. It is really interesting to listen to how the group members have worked with this in different ways. A group member mentioned that she uses gaming in different ways in her teaching. That sounds fun and something I definitely are going to look closer into. To have fun is also a well working way to get learning engaging and something I have to admit I sometimes forget. Maybe I shall put that to my check list for course design, to remember the fun factor?
Hodges, C. et.al (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. EDUCAUSE review.
