Dear friends,
We hope you are all well on this first day of December! Last week was all about openness in education and we know there has been interesting and fruitful discussions going on in the groups. Some of you were able to join the webinar on Friday and listen to Marita Ljungqvist’s presentation about the MOOC project at Lund University. For those of you who weren’t able to join, the seminar was recorded and can be found here.
Today is the start of the sixth and last topic before the concluding week; Supportive Learning Environments. In all forms of education, on and off campus, support is a vital part of the provision. In campus courses we have a tradition, a routine (which may be good or bad) for how students are supported, and since we are around each other at least some of the time, getting and staying in touch with each other is a pretty straightforward business. In online course settings it is easy to feel lost or confused from the start and not always self-evident where to go for help. Support for learners then needs to be available in multifarious forms. This topic is for discussing and reflecting around what constitutes good support and how supportive environments can be created. At this point, we would like to encourage you all to go to the Padlet page of blog addresses and read some blog posts that you haven’t looked at before, and also to comment on them! There are so many interesting reflective posts! Please share your personal experiences regarding different aspects of supporting learning and explore together effective support strategies that do or could work in your professional context.
Please notice that there is a tweetchat on Supportive learning environments on Thursday evening!
Kind regards the ONL team