Malin ONL

This is where the course is beginning to make real sense to me. I have developed and taught online courses since 2011 and have had to learn through trial and mistakes what works and what does not. Approaching the guidelines offered by City University London through the lens of Salmon's (2013) five-step model for successful online learning confirms what I already knew - but more importantly taught me a lot of what I did not. Something else I am increasingly becoming aware of is how important it is that colleagues and the institution as a whole are onboard with what one is trying to achieve. This is not always the case, I have found, and then it does not matter how good one's intentions are. The battle is too uphill.  Nevertheless, here a quick summary of some of the things I thought about while reading the material for this week: The initial stage feels very familiar -make sure that the course is accessible, create a friendly welcoming environment, clarify netiquette etc. S...

This week's topic is one that I have already broached a bit in one of my first comments ("Introduction week 2"). Also, the one time in the course that the group is supposed to delve into collaborative learning of different kinds, I cannot participate. The irony is not lost on me and these weeks, I remember seriously considering quitting the course. Not because it seemed like a waste of my time, but because I did not have the time to take full advantage of it - and I let my group down. So what makes me stay on? One reason is that I don't want to leave the group in a lurch any more than I already have. The other reason is that I am still hoping that the course will begin to make sense, that is, that the hours I have after all invested in it will begin to pay off. Possibly, indeed very likely, that investment has still been too small and that is why I am not feeling the rewards yet. One suggested topic for this week's blog is to account for an occasion when coll...

How generous can and should we be with our courses? I have taken a number of MOOCS over the last five years or so, and mostly enjoyed them. I also share my courses and the work I have put into them with my colleagues and students. Despite all this, I sometimes feel protective about my work, precisely because the time I have put into it, the hours I have spent developing courses, material and structures. I am not at all sure why I sometimes feel the latter, but I suspect it has to do with appreciation, or rather, the lack of it. David Wiley argues persuasively that there is no education without openness, and of course that is correct, but what he does not take into account is the economics of knowledge (Wiley, 2010). If institutions of higher learning should continue to exist, if teachers should continue to get paid, a balance needs to be struck between adapting to the digital world and maintaining "core functions, structures and identities" (Weller & Anderson). MOOCs ...

Writing an entry about coursework that happened in the PBL Group 6 several weeks ago is challenging but by consulting both the process and the resulting presentation I will try to recapture some of my initial  thoughts on the material and subtopics associated with the course's Topic 1. To begin with, I would define my workplace (the specific subject in which I teach) as semi-digital. The majority of our courses today are taking place online, although we still run some courses exclusively on campus. As a result, it is easy to lose one's motivation for teaching and developing courses in general. And that is not surprising, because everything suddenly seems different. Where are the students, who are the students and how do I communicate with them? So we come to the topic of digital literacy. I have developed my own digital literacy as both a teacher and a student of online courses, and concur with Belshaw, who defines such literacy as a "continuum of ambiguity" rat...

2. Connecting After getting some of the apprehensions and general scepticism off my chest, I feel ready to approach this course with a more open mind. And it is encouraging that the question I asked in my first post is (somewhat) addressed in the reading material for this week. Davidson and Howell Major's (2014) article on group learning seems like a good starting-point. The two authors distinguish among three types of group learning. As the title of their article suggests, these are coöperative learning, collaborative learning, team-based learning and problem-based learning. All four approaches are constructivist in nature, but to different degrees, it seems. The coöoperative approach is the one I am best familiar with from before and have used in my own classrooms. What I like about this kind of group work is that I still have some control over what my students learn (p. 14). When students work together in groups, typically with study questions, they sometimes move superfi...

1. Getting Started I am way behind in my reading for this course, so writing anything on this blog has not made sense until now. Since I still have some catching up to do, in this entry, I will just comment and reflect on the texts and videos that appeared in the first few weeks of the course.   To begin with, I am not really sure what I have signed up for. This does not worry me too much, per se. Studies of students with advanced reading skills, for example, show that students who read a lot do not worry when a texts does not immediately make sense. Instead, they trust that they will eventually figure it out. In other words, they trust their own ability to make sense out of chaos and they trust that the chaos is illusory. Experience tells them it will probably be ok. So that is where I am. In the chaos, trusting that things will eventually begin to make sense.  But I am apprehensive. Reading the suggested blogposts by Kay Oddone I find myself increasingly qu...