After this topic I think I am now beginning to understand what online learning is.

As I read other people’s reflections about this it seems that a lot of us were in a similar situation at least before this ONL course started. Especially the ones like myself with very minimal experience in online courses as a student and even less so as a teacher, especially since all of our courses in engineering follow the traditional structure. 

I realise now too as others did that online and/or blended learning (and consequently course design for that) is not about just using online tools and AI to prepare slides, record some lectures, upload necessary material and organize the assignments and tell teh students where to find these.

There must be a thought out structure that combines interaction between the students using some problem based learning activities to encourage participation and active learning.

I realise now that what I wrote on previous reflection about having students peer review each other’s assignment is a step towards that direction and one of the good practices when trying to design such a course.

It aligns with the Community of Inquiry framework by building:

  • Social Presence: Peer review forces students to talk to each other, look at how someone else approached a similar engineering problem, and realize they are part of a group (as a class and as future colleagues in their professional lives later on)
  • Cognitive Presence: When a student has to look at a peer’s CAD drawing, code, or structural calculation and say, “This works, but here is what you can improve….,” they aren’t just memorizing. They are analyzing and evaluating—the highest levels of critical thought.
  • Teaching Presence: It shifts me as a teacher from being the sole bottleneck of feedback to the designer of the feedback loop.

And as discussed in our PBL group, having activities in such a course that cannot be done with AI helps a lot with assessment and is eventually necessary in this era of generative AI. And again the above type of activity helps in that regard too. This was also a large part of our group discussion and also during the two webinars for this topic about how much AI should be used by teachers and students

I normally caution the use of  AI and ask my students to always challenge the outputs. I guess some or most of my colleagues are of the same mindset. But recently I had a revelation moment in a discussion with one of our senior year students who are now doing their thesis work.

I was helping him with an experimental method he hadn’t used before and as I was asking him questions about it he gave me a blank stare back. I asked why he hadn’t used AI to learn the basics , theory and some understanding of it before coming (since it’s so easy now and the AI can handle this level of knowledge) and he said that AI is stupid and he’s afraid that he would get wrong answers that’s why he doesn’t like to use it. 

I was kinda shocked by such an absolute viewpoint. Are we pushing students the other way now already scared of AI? 

I believe that when designing online/blended courses clear guidelines about the use of AI should now be a staple. Students need a framework and clear instructions from the facilitator/teacher about this.

In conclusion, true online learning design requires us to stop digitizing old habits and start engineering completely new experiences. By transforming our assessment strategies to focus on collaborative problem-solving, leveraging the peer-review process, and having generative AI as a useful tool rather than a shortcut, we can build courses that are much more engaging based in active, critical thinking.