ONL 4 - Blended and online learning

My courses follow a rather straight forward template. They consist of frontal 90 minute lectures, which contain me writing on the blackboard, interaction with the students, small exercises for them to do during the lecture and weekly mandatory assignments, possibly assignment sessions. The assignments are discussed also during the lectures and repeat the material, fill gaps, give connections to past and future parts of the course, and have the students reflect. Students are encouraged to do the assignments in groups. Assessment is via a final project and oral exams, which might be in the form of a midterm oral.

Interaction with students outside of class is by email, office visits and in one course I had a "chat office hour", meaning that for one hour a week, I would be in a certain chat room and answer within a minute.

An interesting concept we learned about in the course is the community of inquiry (CoI), see the very good book Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry by Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison, as well as the excellent article Online Collaboration Principles by Garrison. The CoI is a framework suitable for higher education with the premise that this requires a collaborative approach on the part of the students and that how we learn is contructivist, meaning we learn not passively, but by actively constructing our body of knowledge. This framework consists of three aspects, namely the social, the cognitive and the teaching presence in the course. The role of the teacher (the teaching presence) here is not only to give lectures, but to give all the scaffolding for the students to be a productive part of the community of inquiry. In the words of the before mentioned Eugene Kim, "space defines people". The methods with which people can interact, what the social and legal rules of interaction are and who the people in the interaction space are, defines the behavior.

As I described in the opening, I give the students very little scaffolding. And to be honest, I do not really understand the space my students are in. This did not use to be the case and the change is probably due to culture. The students in Sweden are massively less communicative than in the US or Germany, where I also worked as a university teacher. And it's not only that they do not communicate with me or other teachers, the communication between students is also extremely limited. Questions that their neighbour in class can answer are posed to me. Seating in class after 7 weeks is still that a large fraction sits alone. It used to take me a week to get a relationship to my students, now it's 3-4 and then the course is half over, since courses here are only 2 months (it's 2-3 in the US, 3-4 in Germany). Curiously, this actually reduces my incentive to invest time into the students, since after 2 months, it's a new batch. Since the students talk less in general, it also means that they talk less in general about the course content, leading to less reflection. All of this suggests that more scaffolding is actually needed, not only on the course level, but the level of the study program as a whole.

An important question going forward for me is how to further a community of inquiry not only in my courses, but in our study programs in general. An opportunity to work on this is our a mathematical programming course in Python that a colleague of mine has developed. This course has immense success, and is now being given several times a year to various audiences, such as teachers, immigrants with a technology background and math Bachelor students. Last summer, the lectures were recorded, which gives new options with regards to online teaching. A new group that we have in mind are PhD students. A question is now if one can offer a version of the course where they can work using the video lectures and small group assignments with little additional teacher support.

ONL 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

So, networked collaborative learning it was in topic three. Let's untangle this a bit, we have learning here, and it's done collaboratively and in a network. Eugene Kim from Faster than 20 immediately comes to mind. He has a lot to say on collaboration, how you do it and why. The why is a tautology: It makes sense if it makes sense. The sibling of collaboration is cooperation. There you work on a common goal, but by dividing the work. This is known to every student of mathematics: You have your weekly assignment and you divide the problems among the people in your work group and cheerio, you have just saved a ton of time. Collaborative learning has to somehow beat this simple truth. But it is much harder.

You have to acknowledge that others can help you, even though you are so great or even though you are so weak that in your well founded opinion, you are of no help to anyone. As Eugene puts it, you have to train your collaborative muscles, just as all the others. As with all things, the benefit you get from it increases with training. 

Two new terms that I learned about are the personal learning network (PNL) and social loafing. The PNL is your network of people that you interact with to help in your learning. This can take on very diverse forms and use is adjusted in topic and problem dependent ways. A course should induce you to strengthen this network.

Social loafing (deutsch: Soziales Faulenzen, ja wirklich!) is an interesting concept about group behavior: It has been observed in several experiments that individuals can take a free ride approach to group work, meaning that they loaf around and let the others do the work. This implies that assessment and monitoring of group work plays an important role.

Now, let's put all this together in topic 4, blended learning!

ONL 2 – Sharing and Openness

A while ago, I wrote about Open Access in the context of science and in particular, collaborative science. Since then, a lot has happened. By now, the University systems of Sweden, Germany and California no longer have access to Elsevier articles, due to failed subscription negotiations. Norway and Hungary have abandoned negotiations, but still access, as far as I can see. Strangely enough, some scientists just ignore this as if it hasn't happened. Swedes, Germans and Californians continue to serve on Elsevier boards and a PhD student of mine recently attended a conference in Germany, where the proceedings where in an Elsevier journal. The organizers themselves thus would not be able to download the articles from their proceedings.

Springer, on the other hand, has a new contract with both german and swedish universities that follows what the universities wanted: A significant decrease in fees, combined with open access provisions for authors from those universities. When awesome scientists publish with Springer, it is open access, see e.g. here.

The corresponding movement in education is called Open Educational Resources (OER). For me, the concept is associated with MIT Open Courseware, where one of the truly brilliant mathematical educators, Gilbert Strang, has put many of his lectures. A term that came up in this context is that of MOOCs, massively online open courses. A course that made a lot of headlines was run in 2011 at Stanford with Sebastian Thrun being one of the organizers. They had 100.000 people signing up and more than 20.000 finishing. These are both amazing and disappointing numbers. With this kind of throughput, as it is called in sweden, even in education, you would get a sequence of more and more unpleasant discussions with your superiors.

Nevertheless the question you have to ask yourself as an educator is: Where is my place in teaching, when such courses exist. And the answer has to be: I can deliver something more valuable to my students. If it isn't, it is probably not in society's interest to fund you as a teacher, respectively your style of teaching. And honestly, I am not afraid of MOOCs.

A more interesting term that I learned about in ONL is the LOOC, meaning a little online open course, which is something like the ONL course itself. In the ONL course, there are small groups (ours is five people), helped along by facilitators. And this gives value. I really do wonder where the universities place will be in this. A big question already now is: How do we organize live long learning? Is this the domain of private enterprise? Or should the government take a role in this? If there is the right to a sabbat year, as some suggest, who funds the education? I assume that the answer here will depend a bit on who moves first. If universities establish themselves there, they might be the answer.

A question that arises now is, how can you create a collaborative and nurturing learning experience online? And the more I think about this question during the course, the longer a rather disturbing thought takes up space in my brain. And this thought is: What did you ever do in your offline courses for a collaborative and nurturing learning experience? Which is in fact in line with my blogpost from last time: There is not that much of a difference between offline and online. And I have honestly not put much work and thought into how my students learn and work: Form groups, people! It's good for you! See you next week! So the third topic of the ONL course, "Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning" should deliver more on this question.