Context is King

Photo by Valario Davis on Unsplash

In this topic, our group tackled the issue of what needs to change in our teaching style and design when going from classroom style to blended or online learning. As I have written before, there are examples out there in the MOOC world in which not much is different—video recorded lectures and regular exams. But shifting teaching to a different context obviously provides lots of scope for innovation and development, as well as restrictions and challenges. I had a hard time seeing more than the latter at the beginning. I am happy to report that I think I figured out how to address the limitations of online or blended learning as well as can now identify the gains from moving to an online format. For example, I love the idea that students’ contributions to online chat discussions must be written and are semi-permanent, as this should be an impetus for deeper, more careful reasoning on their part. I also think students remember more what they see/read than what they hear.

What I have learned ranges from the small and pragmatic:

Teach with many more slides than when in person because you won’t have body language and activity to keep students’ minds from wandering (City University London 2016).

to the grand, such as ideas like a “community of inquiry” (Vaughan et al. 2013), 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).

This quote struck me as reflecting the ideal of collaborative learning the most and is super motivating. I also found Vaughan et al.’s (2013) distinction between teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence very helpful in identifying the role I play as a teacher and thinking about how these roles change if I try to adapt to collaborative, PBL or online learning. To be clear, this specific discussion of teaching and learning is not necessarily relegated to blended or online learning, but rather to any good teaching that involves students as more than passive recipients of content.

One area of difficulty in my experience of this topic is the strong focus on social integration. Social integration is key to student retention (van Ameijde et al. 2018) and losing students has been likened to social suicide in Tinto’s Student Integration Model (1975) because it reflects a failure social integration (among other things). While I agree that social integration made my experience of this ONL course more enjoyable and cemented my commitment to the course and group, I struggle with how it can be fostered in a classroom setting (online or in person).

If I imagine beginning a course that aims to teach heavy static content, I might be agitated on the first day to be wasting time with lengthy introductions or stories about ourselves, course experiences related by alumni, or a learning preference inventory (all tools suggested in Vaughan et al. (2013)). So, in my view, there is a disjuncture between what makes sense when teaching content and when teaching collaboration (such as in this course). My challenge from this topic is then how to make the process of generating social integration among the students hidden.

 

References

City University London. (2016). Online Facilitation Techniques.

Everson, M., Garfield, J. (2008). An innovative approach to teaching online statistics courses. Technology Innovations in Statistics Education, 2(1).

van Ameijde, J., Weller, M. and Cross, S. (2018). Learning Design for Student Retention. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, Vol 6 | Issue 2 | pp.41-50. 

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press.