Welcome to topic 4 – Design for online and blended learning

We hope that you all at this point of time in the course feel quite well-settled with the ONL learning environment and that you have found a good structure for your studies and PBL group work. It seems that the previous topic on Learning in communities was inspiring and engaged you in good discussions and reflection on collaborative and networked learning.

Interesting presentations from the PBL groups are being shared in the ONL212 community space under PBL group work submissions. Don´t miss the opportunity to look at and comment on what the other groups have created using different tools.

For this fourth topic, Design for online and blended learning, we shift our focus from participation in a learning environment, to the perspective of the educator in designing for learning. You will have the opportunity to explore aspects of Learning Design as well as different design frameworks like Community of Inquiry (CoI), to learn about important pedagogical aspects in creating a good blended and online learning experience for your students.

During the first week of topic 4 we have a webinar (23 November) with Martin Weller, professor of Educational Technology, in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at the UK Open University.

For the second week of topic 4, we hope you will take the opportunity to join the last ONL212 tweetchat (1 December) together with Martin Weller.

At this point, we would also like to encourage you all to read some participants’ blogs that you haven’t looked at before, and also to comment on them!

We wish you two great weeks!

The ONL team