Design for online and blended learning
Even though
we did well during the pandemic, switching from campus-based lectures to online
lectures there is a lot of challenges in transforming learning activities from
a campus course to an online course. Most of lectures were just transcribed
from IRL lectures to online lectures.
A lot of teachers
have been struggling with activities that didn´t work, the feeling of lecturing
for a black wall, quite students and problems with examinations.
I think
that there is a lot more to learn on how to transform traditional education in
a classroom to online classrooms and I think this pandemic have given us a lot
of data to analyze and a lot of experience that we need to collect and learn
from.
This topic and
the whole ONL course had a direct impact for me. Right now, I´m working on
developing one online course and one distance course with blended learning. My
teaching experience is long (28 years) and I have a lot of knowledge about digitalization
of education, online- and blended learning, and digital tools. I have never
done an online- or blended course so it is a big challenge to see if I can
transform my knowledge to good courses. I hope this journey will help me develop
new knowledge in designing good quality online- and blended courses.
In an
online course you need to put effort into planning for social, cognitive, and
teaching presence.
Social presence is for me where you set the climate for the group and for me it should be build up on trust. The cognitive presence is about creating areas and assignments where students can construct new knowledge. It is important that the participants feel meaningfulness in what they are doing. Teaching presence is about how I as a teacher facilitate and design the course.
In my
courses I would like to consider the use of UDL, universal design for learning,
and gamification theory of the human needs that game makers use as triggers in
their game. I will try to create a course that is inclusive and especially in the
online course try to find a way to use different triggers to motivate students
to finish the course in time.
I will end
this blogpost with refer to Lipman (1991) and the Community of Inquiry (CoI)theoretical framework:
Education
is both a collaborative and an individually constructivist learning experience.
Your personal reflection and shared discourse are requisite for higher learning
and, practically, are best realized in an educational community of inquiry. A
community of inquiry is where “students listen to one another with respect,
build on one another’s ideas, challenge one another to supply reasons for
otherwise unsupported opinions, assist each other in drawing inferences from what
has been said, and seek to identify one another’s assumptions”. (Lipman, 2003, p
20)
I think
that this is what we need to create in new ways in the digital context of
education.
See you next week!
Hi Agneta,
SvaraRaderaYes, it's not easy to transform campus educational thinking to go online - But exiting and provide us with a vast amount of possibilities :-) The Blended approach is, as I see it, often the most advantageous to use. However, also a challenge to find "the best" mix form an efficient and effective perspective. Good luck with the design of your courses...and let's discuss their design further on :-)
Hi, Agneta. I really appreciate your reference to UDL. After several years of teaching, I have a tendency to assume that all students start the course with the same level of skills and learning styles - which is not true and not possible. Found the UDL framework you referred to particularly illuminating! Thanks. Best, Cheah.
SvaraRaderaThank you for sharing your thoughts on course development! Interesting to read a bit more about the Community of Inquiry Digital Framework.
SvaraRadera