Author: Tobias Henriksson

Topic 5: What have I learned during ONL?

What are the most important things you have learned through your engagement in the ONL course? Why?

  • As I actually don’t even own a degree in pedagogy this has probably been more of an introduction to that whole topic than for most other learners. But what an introduction it has been. Even if we ignore the different topics, simply taking a PBL course has been a real eye opener for me and If I were to choose I would make this mandatory for every teacher at my school. How can one design a good online course if one hasn’t attended one?
  • Of all the topics, the things that come to mind is the part about Creative Commons, Open Education Resources, how to avoid social loafing and finally how to design an optimal course using what we learned during the pandemic and mixing it with good teaching design, such as Community of Inquiry.

How will your learning influence your practice?

  • I’d say that I finally understand what people mean when they say that we should stop talking about online pedagogy and instead just call it pedagogy. It’s not about the tools. Actually, as I stated during the last topic, I hope that educators finally have realized how few tools they really need in order to teach. A laptop, a LMS and Google Workspace basically. 

What are your thoughts about using technology to enhance learning/teaching in your own context?

  • As I work in ICT it’s my job to work with the physical tools in the classroom. Despite that, I do think that we shouldn’t be buying technology for the sake of technology. Using technology in combination with good teaching design we can give learners not just an educational experience that is a bit more flexible than old school classroom teaching (and pedagogically worse), but instead an experience that really is better in every way.

What are you going to do as a result of your involvement in ONL? Why?

  • I will write a piece about this course for our staff and also advertise it to our teachers. 

What suggestions do you have (activities and/or in general) for the development of eLearning in your own teaching or context?

  • As mentioned earlier: don’t overwhelm yourself by constantly changing everything in the way you teach. Keep the number of tools down to a minimum but get to know them well. As I work in ICT I also should mention: never underestimate the importance of good sound quality, i.e. a good microphone and good acoustics.

Topic 4: What’s the optimal course design?

In my work in ICT and as a part of a development project designing the classrooms for the coming 10 years, I have really had to take a step back to have a look at where we are headed with all this. During the first year after the emergency remote teaching the situation was a real wild west. It was a time where every teacher had the chance to do whatever they wanted when it came to how and where they held their courses, as long as they stored the material in the same LMS. 

As I see it, the pandemic was great in the way that we finally got rid of all the printed papers lying around in classrooms and we finally offered both students and teachers the freedom to basically sit wherever they wanted (except at the school). I also really hope that the teachers have taken the opportunity to reflect on all the tools they really need in order to teach. No, we don’t need the 50 pedagogical online tools that fill up my email inbox. All you need is the laptop you have been provided, an LMS and a few tools from Google Workspace. A good headset is also important. 

Simply switching a lecture to an online format overnight proved to be a bad idea and as discussed in the previous topic, especially the social presence part of the educational experience (Garrison 2007) was lacking in the case of many educators’ teaching designs, including my own. Asynchronous methods seem wiser in many ways. It offers you the flexibility of online teaching but without the technical difficulty of synchronous hybrid teaching. Courses can be designed in a way that the learners meet each other physically at times but then have the flexibility to work wherever and whenever they want at other times. 

In our PBL group work we took this one step further and instead of discussing how online teaching during the pandemic might have worsened the wellbeing of our learners during the pandemic, we instead discussed how online methods actually can be used to improve the wellbeing of learners. More than old school classroom teaching can offer as well. As a base for this we used the Community of Inquiry framework. In the end we ended up with quite a long list of methods for building an atmosphere in the classroom where everyone feels comfortable. Comfortable to share their thoughts and express their feelings.

Sources:

Garrison, D. R. (2007). Online community of inquiry review: Social, cognitive, and teaching presence issues. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(1), 61-72.

Topic 3: How does one design the optimal collaborative learning experience?

This course has been a real eye-opener for me personally as it is the first course I’ve taken that focuses on learning in small groups, in the form of problem based learning (PBL) in this case. I can immediately say that it has markedly improved my learning compared to a completely text based online course I took during the summer. Kalmar et al 2022 argue that there generally is a lack of socio-emotional interaction in online education and that this has taken a toll on the wellbeing of learners during the pandemic. As the Community of Inquiry framework also states, social presence, along with cognitive and teaching presence, make up the educational experience (Garrison 2007).

With collaborative learning one issue that arises is the option of social loafing among learners. As the group size grows, the size of the visible individual effort in the end result usually shrinks and some group members may be tempted to let everyone else do the work. The motivation among everyone might shrink as a result of this. How can one avoid this as an educator? How does one go about designing the optimal collaborative learning experience?

As I stated, one simple factor that can be adjusted in order to avoid social loafing is choosing the right group size. Sugai et al. found that groups consisting of 4 people were optimal for their educational purposes. I have a feeling that another important factor here lies in what the end result has to be and in the way it is shared to other groups. As an extreme – not sharing any results to anyone outside the group probably decreases the effort put into creating it. On the other hand, if the group knows beforehand that the result of the collaborative work is to be shown to everyone, then this alone might be a good motivator for everyone in the group. Of course, the goal with collaboration should always be that the end result is larger than the sum of the individual contributions put into it. We can take an engine as an example. A group of learners are tasked to build an engine and that in the end, everyone will be watching as the group starts the engine they’ve built.

Sticking with the engine metaphor – another factor I suspect may be important is that everyone has their own part to work on. The task is designed in such a way that it has several parts. Preferably, the group should comprise of learners with different abilities, meaning that they really do need to delegate the tasks well in order to make it. After finishing the engine it is easy to look back at which part was built by which group member, if needed. When the task is something less concrete than an engine this delegating could be in the form of a group contract that everyone agrees on beforehand (Fronza & Wang 2020). Peer and self assessment at the end of a collaborative work may also be one solution for social loafing prevention (Raban & Litchfield 2006).

  1. Kalmar E, Aarts T, Bosman E, Ford C, de Kluijver L, Beets J, Veldkamp L, Timmers P, Besseling D, Koopman J, Fan C.(2022). The COVID-19 paradox of online collaborative education: when you cannot physically meet, you need more social interactions. Heliyon, 8(1), e08823.
  2. Garrison, D. R. (2007). Online community of inquiry review: Social, cognitive, and teaching presence issues. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(1), 61-72.
  3. Sugai, M., Horita, T., Wada, Y., Optimal Group Size for High School Students’ Collaborative Argumentation Using SNS for Educational Purposes, 2019, International Journal of Learning Technologies and Learning Environments International Institute of Applied Informatics 2019, Vol. 2, No. 2, 35 – 53
  4. Fronza I, Wang X. Social loafing prevention in agile software development teams using team expectations agreements. IETSoft.2021;15:214–229. https://doi.org/10.1049/sfw2.12019
  5. Raban, R. & Litchfield, A. (2006). Supporting peer assessment of individual contributions in groupwork. In Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. & Reimann, P. (Eds), Who’s Learning? Whose Technology? Proceedings of the 23rd ASCILITE

Topic 2: Thoughts on open learning

So what is this open learning that we are talking about? According to the Open Education Consortium it’s defined as “resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.” (1.).

When reading the case for this topic the first thought that comes to mind is the endless amounts of resources that both me and my students have been using already – Wikipedia and Youtube for instance. This idea of sharing your own teaching resources and practises as a teacher, on the other hand, was something that I haven’t reflected upon earlier. Personally I agree with the statement that information is meant to be shared and in that sense it’s only logical that also this should be shared. In the countries I have studied in, studying at University is free, so there isn’t even an economical reason why not to share material and even courses between different Universities. 

So why should we start using open educational resources and also produce some of our own? To start with, our University is tiny. With around 500 students it is the smallest University of applied sciences in Finland. In some ways it’s our strength as we are able to provide our students with a very personal teaching experience but the number of applicants is unfortunately so little that the future of the school is being discussed every now and then. One reason for the low number of applicants is that it’s located on an island. Online education could be a savior in several ways. We are able to access students that otherwise wouldn’t be students – people in the work life or people living remotely. We are also able to cooperate with others. Here I see a big potential in using open education resources (OER:s). By using open materials produced by larger universities, we are able to hold a high standard on our teaching materials, despite not doing basically any scientific research on our own. 

When thinking about how resources, practises or even whole courses in our University could be opened up for others to use, I get a feeling that for some teachers it would require no extra work, for others a lot. Some parts of the education could be opened up and shared immediately and other parts not. Some courses held for the private sector probably shouldnt be opened up at this point as they are an important source of income. If we were to go all in for MOOCS it would probably require the use of a separate LMS, as the one we’re using, Google Classroom,  is not designed for the purpose. Creating open education resources would require that everyone involved understands Creative Commons licensing (2.). The rise of OER:s may impact the role of both learners and educators as well as higher education as a whole (3.).

Sources:

  1. “What Is Open Education?” Open Education Consortium (website), accessed December 16, 2022.
  2. Creative Commons licences explained, by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZvJGV6YF6Y
  3. Cronin, C. (2017). Open Education, Open Questions. EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017)

Topic 1: How to prevent students from feeling overwhelmed at the start of an online course?

This was one of the questions we answered as a group and the one that stuck with me.

The scenario for these weeks was of course that of our own. For me at least this was the most advanced online course I have ever attended. The choice of scenario was therefore brilliant as it was basically impossible not to think about our own experiences at this very moment. 

So how was my start of the course? I knew it would consist of pedagogy on a high level, which made my palms sweaty due to me not having a degree in it. But despite working in ICT I am part of a development project also working with the development of online learning, so I was pretty sure some good would come out of it. 

Due to especailly busy work weeks I hadn’t done more than the compulsory before the course start – received a welcoming email, registered on the website and had a quick look. Unfortunately I struggled to find the hierarchy in the website, which made finding the relevant information difficult.

Then came the introductory meeting and the first meeting with our PBL group. This was great. I was nervous beforehand as I’ve never been a big fan of group projects but this really felt like the way to start a course. The online courses I’ve taken earlier have all been without online meetings and there you just don’t get the feeling of being part of a group of people. You don’t feel obligated to finish the course and probably don’t learn as much either. Here we all were in the same boat and in a small enough group to dare to communicate with each other. If anything, I would have liked an even broader overview of the course, partly due to my own laziness and partly due to the website not being the most user friendly. What we did get was a good place and time to ask questions but the question I would have liked to ask was “what is it all about?”. I can’t say that this concern was a dealbreaker for me in any way but I did get the feeling that other learners had similar ones. Now one topic later I’m sure most learners are seeing the big picture.

This rough start was of course perfect for us to analyze in topic one. I already explained the concerns I had at the beginning of the course and briefly some solutions to them. During our group work we investigated this topic further. These are some actions we found that the teacher can do at the start of a course in order to prevent the concerns mentioned among learners:

  • Have the info and materials of the course as clear as possible and everything linked to one single, accessible page. 
  • Start off the course with a meeting where the big picture is explained as well as how the course is designed.
  • Create small PBL groups where the learners feel that they are all in the same boat and feel comfortable discussing openly. Set up online meetings regularly.
  • Have facilitators in every PBL group answer questions and guide the groups in the beginning of the course.
  • Have learners lead the discussion in the PBL groups for different topics

As you can see I think this is a great model that you’ve come up with.