Lessons learnt – future practice

The most important thing that I have learnt from this course is how important is socializing and engagement in a learning environment. I have been lucky to be a member of a fantastic group where I felt we were really collaborating since the end of the first topic. It was amazing when we were completing the last assignment because we were collaborating and giving suggestion to the leader of the topic and at the same time we were having a lot of fun. I think it is important socializing because it is the trigger for engagement and engagement lead to work with high efficiency. This fantastic working and learning experience will of course shape my practice. Since the last two topics I have been looking for practical activities to let the students socialize and how to get more engaged in the learning process. I would say that those are the main two targets for next year courses.

I think technology is part of our daily life and of course it should be a key mean to enhance the learning and teaching process. As I have mentioned during the course, I´m interested in tools and activities to help students socializing such as ice-breaking tools/activities. I am also interested in tools to enhance the collaboration and learning. I was thinking to use Wikipedia next year to allow the students improving their critical thinking by reviewing contents, credibility and references of Wikipedia topics related to my courses. I got several inspirations from my colleagues from this course and other courses on how to self-evaluate my teaching through tools that aim to check the students understanding of the lecture. I got a very interesting suggestion from an ONL colleague on how to better organize the course and be more efficient. Record the lecture, post on-line the lecture one day before the class, let the student watch the lecture and then during the lecture discuss about what they have learnt and go deeper on certain aspects. I will use the online lecture for basic information and the physical lecture for some aspects more related to my research.

This course has been fantastic but I feel that it is just a starting point. I would like to know more about tools and activities for socializing and for engaging students. I would like to have the opportunity to go deeper in certain topics we have dealt with in the course and have the possibility to discuss more with other teachers to get more inspiration and motivations to improve my courses. One of the aspect I have appreciated from ONL is the possibility of interacting with other teachers more experienced than me who were willing to share their strategy on how to deal with certain issues related to teaching. FOr instance, I have got several hints from my colleagues on how to boost socializing among students and how to be more efficient in my lectures and how to improve the engagement. I feel that I need more of these opportunities.

Design for online and blended learning

This topic has been most favorite for me due to interesting discussions we had in the group on how to engage students. I felt I have been growing quite a lot in terms of knowledge acquired both by the literature and related events but mostly by my group members who have much more experience than me in teaching. In particular, I have really appreciated the suggestions from them on how to engage students and how to increase the efficiency of my future work in teaching.

First of all, I had to mention that at the beginning I did not fully understand from the literature what community of inquiry means. But I have found an interesting explanation that connect the concept to the parabola of the blind men [1]. This example has made things really clear. Not only for understanding the concept, but mostly has enlighten me on how to organize future teaching activities. Especially in large group of students, it is important to split them in small groups and facilitate the building of a community of inquiry. Talking with my group members, I got interesting hint on how to create a community of inquiry in large groups. One of this is to create a forum where the students instead of asking me directly the questions by email, ask the question to the community: the students first and then me. I will for sure implement such strategy because it actually boost collaboration, engagement and also reduce the amount of email I received in my email account :). What I really liked from this topic and from our group discussion on this topic is to come up with practical examples to be implemented in our teaching activities. One of our team member shared this reference [2] in the FISH document. It is a kind of to-do list for good teaching in online environment. I will print it out and put in my desk as a remainder for the future teaching life.

We went through the Salmon´s five stage model [3] and we spent quite a lot of time on the online socializing. We all agreed that socializing is a key aspect for enhancing engagement and productivity in whatsoever learning environment. I have shared with my colleagues my frustrations about engaging and interacting with students in today´s online lectures. We have thus discuss quite a lot on how to actually start socializing in online environments. Some of my colleagues shared their own experiences and examples and I will try them in the future. I have also found some others here at this reference [4]. While sharing my frustrations as a teacher, I got several hints from my team members on how to organize lectures to increase interactions. Most of my frustrations shared with my colleagues are due to the fact that since we moved on-line due the COVID19, it is quite boring to give lectures. All the students are attending the lectures with the camera off. It is very difficult to get questions on-line. Most of the students do not interact on-line. Most of them they just send email afterwards. It is a kind of weird situation. One colleague suggested to record the lecture, upload it in Canvas and then just having the lecture for discussion. I will follow this strategy in the future.

References

[1] https://rutraining.org/2013/09/02/six-blind-men-and-an-elephant-why-we-need-learning-communities/

[2] https://sleguidance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BL/pages/36962474/Online+facilitation+techniques#app-switcher

[3] Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model. [Homepage] http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

[4] https://museumhack.com/virtual-team-building-for-remote-teams/

Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

Looking at this ONL experience, in particular the group activities, I agree with the results of the study conducted by Capdeferro and Romero [1] on how to avoid frustration in on-line learning environments that is equivalent on how to promote collaboration (since one of the main reasons of frustration is the lack of collaboration). I think in order to promote collaboration, the teacher needs to be an active player in the collaboration process (this was another cause of frustration in [1]). I think that the role of the teacher is extremely important at the beginning to let the members of the group to socialize and let them feel part of the group. In this, the facilitators of our ONL group did the the best and immediately at the end of topic 1 we were already collaborating. I have been focusing on the role of the teacher and I have found an interesting article written by Noguera et al. [2] on the role of the facilitator. In particular I have looked into how the teacher/facilitator can enhance the engagement of the students and promote collaborative learning. I really like the article because makes things clear and shows practical points on how the teacher can enhance the community learning experience with different approaches (i.e., agile approach and scrum approach).

During the COVID-19 period, we are running a distance course (otherwise, it was supposed to be a traditional in class course). It is about the development of a solar car. One of the most productive groups, it is the energy team that I am responsible for. The project owner and then the students have decided to use a dedicated social media tool (Messenger) for discussing, setting meetings and taking quick actions. It works pretty well so far since they are more or less in continuous contact with the supervisors (Johan and me). I have found in literature that social media can boost the collaboration, for instance see Salmon et al. [3]. The use of social media of course hide some risks and as always we need to be careful, especially when it comes to privacy.

Another personal experience that resulted very well in the past in terms of collaboration and engagement was to use Facebook as platform for discussion. I used Facebook in the course “Introduction to sustainable energy systems” [4] as a platform for discussion of scientific articles. At that time I decided to use Facebook because in the previous years, I used Blackboard but there were very few interactions, then I switched to Facebook since the students are more familiar with this social media. It ended up to be much better than Blackboard in terms of interactions.

References

[1] Capdeferro, N., & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(2), 26-44.

[2] Noguera, I., Guerrero-Roldán, A. E., & Masó, R. (2018). Collaborative agile learning in online environments: Strategies for improving team regulation and project management. Computers & Education, 116, 110-129.

[3] Salmon, G., Ross, B., Pechenkina, E., & Chase, A. M. (2015). The space for social media in structured online learning. Research in Learning Technology, 23

[4] https://www.facebook.com/Introductiontosustainableenergysystems2016

Open Learning – Sharing and Openness

I have really appreciated the introduction to the topic 2 by Kiruthika Ragupathi when she mentioned about re-using online material to increase efficiency [1]. As I have mentioned during the padlet reflection, we as teachers we spent so much time in developing lectures and we could be much more efficient by using someone else lecture and investing more time on something else, for instance exercises or other more interesting activities for the students, such as study visits or laboratories. Personally, I have been sharing several mathematical codes and research data but I have never been sharing teaching materials. I can see that there are quite a lot of advantages and disadvantages in sharing teaching materials.

An advantage in sharing teaching material is that this can be a good commercial for me as a teacher and as a researcher because it will increase the number of followers I have in the research communities such as ResearchGate and thus also citations. Sharing material with the logo of my university can also be a good commercial for my university.

Some of the disadvantages in sharing teaching materials are the following. First of all, before sharing my teaching material, I would like that it goes through a some kind of review process, it can also be an internal review process carried out by my colleagues at the university for instance or by other colleges in other universities. Indeed, I would like to avoid spreading mistakes in my online material that could damage the university and myself. Another burden is the copyright of images; I personally think that this is a complicated issue and it probably would be good to ask the opinions of the lawyer of the university. One way to avoid issues with the copyright of figures can be buying pictures in pictures database and or ask professionals to develop figures. However, this can be very costly ad sometimes we do not have budget for these extra matters. In this context, I extremely agree with the view of David Wiley in his TED-talk Open education and the future [2], technology has been developed so much and knowledge could be spread so easily but still there are some mechanisms and attitudes that prevent from sharing. I have appreciated the analogy between today’s technology and sharing attitudes and the development of books and restrictions to translate the Bible in the 15^th century.

At the beginning of this topic, I thought that technology was one of the barrier for sharing. Especially, I was thinking that I would have needed a platform and support from the university for sharing my material. I had this thought because last year we wanted to share a code on the university website as an outcome of a project conducted at the university and we have experienced some kind of resistance from the university due to the extra work for the IT department. During the lectures but mostly during the group discussions I have been learning a lot on how share learning materials and I´m planning to do it in the near future. In particular, one of my colleague in the PBL group was very experienced in Creative Commons license [3]. I have started to look around and I have also found that Canvas, the platform used in my university, can be used as a platform for sharing material under Canvas Commons [4]. Personally, I feel I am very interested in sharing teaching materials but I still feel I am very ignorant on how to do this in the right way. I would appreciate and look for more support, both technical but also legal, from my university to avoid making any kind of illegal action (several issues came up during the discussion after the webinar for Topic 2).

References

[1] https://padlet.com/alacre/ONL201T2

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M

[3] https://creativecommons.org/

[4] http://www.openwa.org/canvas-commons/

Online Participation & Digital Literacies

During the first two weeks of the ONL course, we have been learning a lot about digital literacy through the enlightening lecture of Prof. David White. He introduced us the concept of “visitors” and “resident” in the context of engagement with the web. Visitors are those who use the web as a tool, instead, residents are those who interact and share with the web [1].  I have really appreciate the exercises done by Prof. David white to let us categorize our engagement to the web. Below is my updated resident and visitor map that help me a lot to make me more aware of my engagement with the web tools.

We have also discussed digital literacy, intended as pool of competences to be able to work in the digital world, mainly towards improving teaching and learning. The ONL course and more specifically our group´s facilitators, they have introduced us and support us in learning and using new digital tools (for instance, https://www.visme.co/, and https://coggle.it/).  

In discussing the scenario for the topic 1, we have been focusing on how to create trust in online communities. Within this topic, I have mostly looking into socialization and how to promote socialization in online communities. Socialization is an important part for enhancing the learning activities within for instance an online course. By doing some literature review, I got interested in socializing activities to boost community development and learning [2]. I have discussed those activities with colleagues in the ONL group and at the university and I got a positive feedback on for instance let the students provide a more personal introduction of themselves at the beginning of each course. Another technique that I have learnt that is used to build trust and develop the on-line community of learners is the friendship-based feedback that means boosting the dialogue asking questions and providing nice comments to the received answer with the final goal of facilitating the conversation and discussion in the future [3].

I have really enjoyed work with the group, especially during the last meeting of this topic. We were creating the map of our scenario in coogle and it has been amazing to see how we were helping each other.

References

[1] White, D. S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First monday, 16(9).

[2] Jiang, D., & Zhang, L. J. (2020). Collaborating with ‘familiar’strangers in mobile-assisted environments: The effect of socializing activities on learning EFL writing. Computers & Education, 150, 103841.

[3] Lee, S., Park, D. H., & Han, I. (2014). New members’ online socialization in online communities: The effects of content quality and feedback on new members’ content-sharing intentions. Computers in Human Behavior, 30, 344-354.

Introduction

Hi Everyone!!! My name is Pietro Elia Campana and I am a researcher and teacher at Mälardalen University, Sweden. My research focus mostly on simulation and optimization of energy systems and water food energy nexus. I am also course coordinator for several course on the broad topic of sustainable energy systems. I am here in the ONL course because I am very interested in developing on-line courses and of course I want to know more about online teaching and learning, both theory and practice.