Week 10 – Good practices and main principles of online and blended learning

In our PBL assignment, we collected good practices and main principles of online and blended learning. I enjoyed having conversations with my group mates, and I also found it quite exciting to reflect on my own practice and link theory and practice together. As theory, we built on seven principles from the book Teaching in blended learning environments. The page numbers below refer to this book.

I elaborated on two subtopics: Support purposeful inquiry and Ensure that inquiry moves into resolution. I think these fit together quite nicely. Since our group submission is quite condensed, I add my detailed text below. This text was my main contribution to our PBL conversations.

Support purposeful inquiry

Encourage students to be driven by own interests and relevant challenges, e.g. by forming groups to work to study cases or phenomena which are relevant to their (future) working contexts. Students organize themselves to working groups of c. 3–5 persons and deliver small-scale projects. The projects should relate to the course topic, of course, and to their own life realities (relevant challenges, phenomena, own interests, etc.) – this makes learning more meaningful. Purposefulness also means that students define their aims/goals with the small-scale projects so they can formulate their questions and define their methods and tools of investigation. Finally, students get answers to their relevant questions. – There can be a list of potential topics (or topics from previous courses) for inspiration but we can encourage students to deviate from such lists. – My own practice: students get informed about the main, general topics of the course in the first f2f meeting + online (syllabus), then they write posts about their interests and learning goals (very briefly so that peers really have time to read others’ posts). They post in time so everybody can read and comment on others’ posts. I as teacher also read the posts and make notes to facilitate group formation – but I don’t present my notes only if I see the group has difficulties with establishing groups. In general, small project groups are formed in a f2f workshop quite efficiently and quickly because students know others’ interests and in the f2f workshop they purposefully search for coursemates whose interests seem to be close to theirs.
Track the development of the group projects through tasks, discussions and reflection to make students recognize how their learning proceeds. It is a good idea to apply sub-tasks (milestone tasks, if you like) to help students working with course materials and with their own projects. Group discussions can go online or in the f2f meetings. It is important to gather the ideas of such discussions, e.g. on posters (f2f workshops – photos on posters can be posted online) and discussion areas (online). It is important that the teacher follows students’ posts and builds on them when discussing course content (e.g. in short lectures, instructions, intro to group discussion, posts in the learning platform, etc.) so that (i) students see that their work is acknowledged and used, and (ii) they get feedback and support for their own individual learning and their group projects. – My own practice: I organize learning circles to discuss course literature in f2f meetings. Discussion can continue in the learning platform. Also I ask students to post a critical presentation of a piece of literature which supports their group projects. Also group projects are shared with the whole community in the form of online posts and f2f presentations. It is important that throughout the whole process, students discuss literature with and write assignments to a real, wider audience (their teacher + peers), and that group projects are discussed continuously from ealy on, so that students understand where their investigation is heading. As result of discussions, students often change their project topics to various extent, so discussions help them realize what would be really important, useful and meaningful to themselves and to their peers. Sure, teacher feedback also helps them in deciding which directions to take.

Ensure that inquiry moves into resolution

“Make the cognitive progression explicit. Assist students through layered activities that build on each other through triggering events, exploration, and integration, to resolution.” (p. 58) – My practice: I regularly ask students to report on how their work proceeds, what they need still to go, what the limitations are, etc. When carrying out a project, is is important to know (i) what they already know/can apply, (ii) what they still need to know to reach their goal (e.g. answer research questions), (iii) and what they’ll never be able to answer with their project (because of the limitations of the methods)
“Teach committed relativism; have students take a position and defend it, knowing that there are multiple perspectives and layers of authoritative knowledge (Perry, 1981)” (p. 58). – My practice: with my students in the Language Aware Multilingual Pedagogy program, we take different entry points to language to study the same phenomenon in different ways, recognizing the benefits and limitations of certain approaches (see my co-authored paper). Doing so, they understand better what they resolve and what they leave unresolved/untouched in their work.

Week 9 – Designing online and blended courses

This topic was one of the most interesting and most relevant to me since I always need to organize blended courses in practice (because of the extremely low number of contact teaching hours at our university). In this blog, I reflect on the teaching materials and forms of learning used in this unit.

I’m glad I had the chance to look into the book Teaching in blended learning environments. Well, it was much more than ‘looking into’, actually: I read some of the chapters and collected good hints from the book. In teaching, there are so many situations which recur all the time, e.g. presenting yourself to the group, organizing group discussions, reading circles, facilitating project work, etc. – so it’s good to get new ideas and practical solutions to maintain diversity in teaching. Especially if some students come to three of my courses in parallel (which is not rare), it’s good if they don’t get bored and say ‘ya, we keep doing the same stuff with this guy’.

I also think that the idea of emotions was a perfect choice. My emotions and students’ emotions are very important factors, and it’s also relevant what kind of atmosphere there is in the teacher team which develops the course.

I found the intro video on the Padlet page informative but pretty static and monotonous. However, it was interesting to answer the questions in Padlet; the task made me think about practicalities, for example the relevance of organizing virtual office hours for students to ask or share ideas.

For the first time ever, I participated in the Tweetchat even though first I was pretty critical and wanted to omit that. I think it was a good idea to join, the questions were thought-provoking and practical enough to generate useful dialogue. I think it is a good sign that people dared to be critical and shared counter-arguments quite freely. And how fun that the conversation is now available so one can search for ideas from it!

The CoI questionnaire was OK, but I find it ironic that we needed to calculate our scores with pen and pencil, with the help of a (pdf) print version of our answers and a static table. I know from practice (from our Erasmus+ in-service teacher training Everyday Creativity) that making an online questionnaire where scores are calculated and feedback is given automatically is not rocket science… Watching the recording of the webinar, it turned out that others also found the task of calculating scores quite difficult.

Arriving to the webinar, I must say I was slightly disappointed. The content was OK, I especially found interesting the ideas about the role of language and embodiment in interaction. Further, the idea that there are no negative emotions was quite strong and made me think about being fair and open even when not everything is as ideal as we’d wish. In brief, I learnt that ‘everything is good form something’, even moments when things go downhill. My critique mainly concerns interaction during the webinar. First, the pace was quite slow. I would also avoid asking random people (using teacher power) if there’s no volunteer to answer a question. If nobody answers a question, there can be several reasons in the background: the question is not clear, is not motivating or relevant to the students, is not asked in the correct moment (students are not yet prepared to answer it), etc. It doesn’t help if one forces answers randomly because answers might easily be irrelevant. In the case of this very webinar, I wouldn’t say that the answer was irrelevant, though, but rather it pointed to challenges with the tasks and the content of the webinar.

Week 8 – Collaborating on Collaboration

It has been fascinating to see in the past weeks how quickly our PBL has become a well-functioning group. I think the challenges at the beginning also helped to realize that people actually need time and so much more to start forming a collaborative group rather than a random bunch of persons.

I’m quite pleased with our Coggle presentation which summarizes how groups work collaboratively. I mainly contributed to the Forming part because this was closest to the everyday challenges I face in f2f and digital learning environments. Below I summarize some main points with reflections on ONL191. I collected my experiences and did not follow any piece of literature but I think these thoughts are present in several publications and/or guidelines.

Appropriateness: the task should be challenging and complex enough to offer it for collaboration. – I think my main problem with Topic 1 was that I didn’t find it interesting enough to really put effort to working on it. Topic 2 was fantastic as it opened new pathways of thinking to me, and it became the basis of a future conference presentation. It has really boosted me!
Hanging out: people need time to get to know each other. – At the beginning, I was slightly irritated in our PBL meetings because I felt we didn’t talk about the essential things and wasted time on technical issues in quite a roundabout way. Now I realize how important it was to leave time for small talk and be patient when setting dates or deciding on which tool we’d use, etc. Using time generously made the atmosphere comfortable and inclusive.
Managing expectations & enhancing ownership and belonging: participants should know what they are asked for / what they signed up for, and they need to be able to influence the nature of the collaborative project to feel ownership and belonging to it. – I had some difficulties at the beginning as I didn’t really know what to expect, and it made me quite upset; I continuously kept considering that I’d leave the course. Luckily I stayed and step by step I understood what and how we work here. Further, I realized I can decide quite independently how I manage my tasks and it also comforted me.
Agreeing on channels of communication: in online environments, it is especially important that communication channels are known and used by all members. – It’s been interesting to follow how our communication channels changed. First we used the PBL13 site of this website quite a lot, and there were some e-mails here and there. I thought I’d prefer e-mail because I got used to control the main stream of my professional communication in e-mails. Step by step, we switched to WhatsApp totally, and now everything goes there. It’s been relieving that I don’t need to check two-three channels but get everything in one thread.
Scheduling: to orchestrate group work, there should be a temporal rhythm in collaboration, and participants should be aware of that beforehand. – First scheduling looked chaotic to me but now we have a good rhythm in the group. Also we are quite flexible, we even cancelled a whole meeting! 🙂
Roles: a clear definition of roles is necessary. – It is interesting how we switch between roles: e.g. the facilitators of PBLs remain the same, but topic leaders change continuously. It gives some diversity and excitement to work.

Week 4 – digital literacies

Continuing my reflections on the webinar on online presence and digital literacies, I would first note that I don’t believe Cultural, Constructive, Creative and Comunicative skills are so distinct of digital modalities. Digital tools of course can enhance and accelerate the development of such skills to some extent (even to great extent), but I don’t believe these are definitive elements of digital literacies per se. I have the same take on the claim that Confident, Cognitive, Critical and Civic mindsets would be so directly connected to the digital era. Sure, if we consider that we need to be more aware of what we post as we reach huge communities so easily, these mindsets are maybe more important than in other modalities, so I can relate to that part. I just find it problematic how digital literacies are branded as something radically new. I can rather relate to the recycling/remaking idea which emphasizes that several literacy skills that we develop in different contexts are integrated and transformed into digital modalities, and of course digital literacy practices also influence ‘offline’ activities.

Another rather direct distinction in the suggested materials that hit me was the native vs. immigrant or resident vs. visitor dichotomy. Here again I have witnessed a rather unreflected celebration of native/resident communities. Native speakerism is a pretty problematic concept in linguistics as well so I don’t quite see the point why it is worth adapting to this context as well. Sure, the recommended materials to some extent have noted that literacies can be understood along a scale so being native doesn’t necessarily mean to be perfect. However, emphasizing nativism can discourage people with ‘non-native’ digital identities, suggesting that non-natives cannot really help so-called natives. Thinking about languages, I have experienced that I can help my native English speaker students in academic writing even though I am not a native speaker – but still, I have built some specific skills, and they can benefit from dialogue with me.

Just like the person in the scenario, I feel confused in this course. Not because I can’t handle devices or software nor because this would be my first online course (I’ve taken some already and also taught online). I simply find communication in this course chaotic and opaque. Quite often I feel I just simply quit because I don’t really need another layer of assignments in my life which then lead to frustration rather than a rewarding experience. Anyway, I don’t yet quit so let’s see what emerges from this mess.

Week 3 – online participation

I couldn’t follow the live webinar, so I answer some of the questions I found interesting when reading the slides. So first, what irritates me in digital technology? I think it’s not digital technology in itself that irritates me but rather its quite uncritical celebration in education.

Quite often, it is taken for granted that we need to use IT wherever and whenever to transform interaction but interaction can actually follow quite similar patterns with or without technology, as my own research also shows. I think IT tools provide certain good opportunities but we shouldn’t rely on them too much or blindly. I quite often use ‘offline’ discussions and crafting (gluing, cutting, drawing, etc.) in my university teaching because I found embodied multi-sensory learning can be enhanced by such methods as well.

Answering questions about my personal history, I have been using computers since 1993 (then I was 11) and got my first online experience at around 1994. I immediately wanted to watch online videos which was quite challenging since the connection was pretty slow. Then the internet looked quite different, and I needed to be quite conscious about what and how to search as search engines were quite primitive – compared to the current situation. From the very beginning, being online has meant being multilingual as well. Already in the 90s, I used quite a lot of English and then French as my skills had developed. Today I mainly use English, Finnish and Hungarian in my online life – Hungarian being my native language but not my main working language.

I started using my first mobile phone in 2000; I very seldom used it as it was so expensive to call and text. But anyway, it has proved to be useful. I have been using Google services since 2005. I started using social media platforms at around the same time. Then there was a pretty popular Hungarian portal called iWiW – now it doesn’t exist any more. I joined Facebook at around 2006 but last year abandoned it due to my emerging social media addiction. I have experienced many positive effects of not being on FB and not using other main social media platforms either. For this reason, I am quite critical about the ever increasing pressure on academics to be on social media and post and share all the time. It’s like pressing alcoholics to drink more alcohol as part of their regular job. I think that through my teaching, research and other outreach activities I can still gain visibility and make an impact.

Week 2 – Connecting

This week ONL191 has gone OK. Nothing extraordinary, nothing revolutionary, but practicalities get organized and first tasks are done. This week has been quite hectic, surprise meetings, surprise tasks, super tight deadlines – and I’ve been travelling whole week so I’m not yet overjoyed. But hopefully the team goes to a good direction 🙂

Otherwise I think I’ve been active and helped the group in reaching its goals. It’s interesting to see how heterogeneous this group is; we actually picked the topic of diversity as the organizing idea of our PBL13 presentation as well. Let’s see how the journey continues!