Haiii…!!!
I am Adithya Thaduri, Associate Senior Lecturer in the division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering at Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden.
During my education, I am quite fascinated about teaching being my favorite teachers as idols. I was engrossed in their teaching styles and learnt the concepts in such that they were everlasting. When I climbed up the ladder in education, the teaching styles were quite changed because the way we learnt will be in higher level in Cognitive process.
After moving to research, I am became out of touch of teaching for a while and then involved in several research publications and projects that are more applied in a sense that will benefit directly to the industries and indirectly to the Government and society. The research I conducted are focused on specific problems and learnt the process of solving problems by research methodology.
As I observed, there are two distinct of learning process where one learning aspect is related to understanding the fundamental concepts of engineering principles and another learning aspect is confined to the application of these concepts to the real world problems. I came to realize there is a lack of connection between these learning mechanisms between education and research.
During this same time, due to recent developments in Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT), there are various technologies originated and developed in digital arena where you can get data, extract information, gain knowledge and obtain wisdom on various current problems not only in technological side but also in other sectors. These technologies are also helpful in connecting to people from different parts of World at the same time.
In addition, there is an exponential growth of online learning platforms based on Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC), where people from different parts of world can learn the fundamental concepts in all streams. They can learn through distance with which some are free and some are paid, provided with certificates. This movement also ignite other universities to go digital with learning management software (LMS) such as Canvas, EdX, Coursera, etc..
Due to accessibility to obtain information and knowledge, these tools will facilitate faster learning with collaborative approach. In addition, most of the problems are quite multidisciplinary in nature. Not everyone become an expert in all subjects in an Academic arena. Hence, the multidisciplinary problems need a group of experts from multiple disciplines.
As I am looking to these challenges, I encountered one of my friend’s blog about this course on digital literacies and came to know about Open Networked Learning. This exactly fits into the context of specific problem where a problem needs to be solved by a group of people from different subjects and learn in a pedagogical way.
Hence, I enrolled into this course with enthusiasm to try out problem based learning with three main core steps; Focus, Investigate and Share (FISH Model).
Looking forward for this course and learn during this process.
