ONL 5: Lessons learnt – future practice

I did not have specific expectations on what to learn during the ONL course, but I did expect that it would make me reflect more on my teaching. And this it did indeed. The most important thing it taught me are new concepts around which to frame my teaching. Specifically, there are two I found most useful, the Personal Learning Network (PNL) and the Community of Inquiry (CoI).

The PNL is a very concrete concept that everyone can immediately relate to and for example, write it down for a specific course. And just from thinking about how my students interact, it becomes very clear that there are a lot of them where there is not much of a network at all. This is not a cultural thing, but a structural one, which in my perception differs from program to program. The program I am most involved in, mathematics at the faculty of science, could certainly need more elements that improve networking. This is far from a revolutionary insight, and during the last few years, some changes have been made to this effect already by others.

The Community of Inquiry on the other hand is a much more abstract concept, but it allows to frame the interaction between the teachers and the students and have an image in mind on what you want to achieve. As explained in the previous post, I have so far not given much thought on how and if students develop group cohesion and if they collaborate. This course has made me reflect on that and it has become clear that I should change that. It is not entirely clear to me how to do this, but I have obtained ideas and thus a starting point. One thing that I, a bit strange in hindsight, never thought about much is the difference between cooperation and collaboration. And a lot of students only cooperate: Given a weekly assignment to do in a group, they divide the work and never discuss it. So, they need more nudging.

As for elearning in general, we will see. Lund University has just decided to switch the Learning Management System to Canvas and we will see how that goes. We will also see how lifelong learning will change higher education. Elearning will play a big part in this, I am sure and lessons from this course will be very valuable and a LOOC like this can serve as a model.

Going forward, we have agreed in our group to keep the What's app group of our work group alive and to use it as a sounding board for teaching ideas. I have anyhow enjoyed working with all of you!

On another note:

• Writing is hard. For me, for you and for George R. R. Martin as well. And he wants to know from Steven King how on earth he does it: "You never have a day where you write a sentence, and you hate the sentence, and you wonder if you have any talent at all, and maybe you should have become a plumber instead?" 

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. 

ONL - Topic 1 - Online participation & digital literacies

As to be expected, the beginning of the course was a lot about people getting to know each other and finding a relationship. A first and very positive finding was the video software Zoom. It works extremely well, even with 60 people attending a video conference and has lots of useful feature that work smoothly.

Otherwise, the first part of the course seems to be aimed at people who are not that well aquainted with the internet. The notion that there is an online and an offline world does not strike me as useful anymore, particularly in academia and in a course that is supposed about using online tools to help learning. I do not see how the concept of digital literacy differs from the concept of literacy. Anything written about it remains true (albeit a bit obvious), when the words digital and online are dropped from all statements. In the course literature, this is true, at best. There is the concept of a "digital identity", as if such a thing could be uniquely defined, anymore than that none of us has a unique identity in the first place and changes who they are depending on the circumstances.

An important topic that was touched upon are free licenses. After having had to become a copyright expert by editing Wikipedia, that was unfortunately not much new.

Another realization however was that while for me, the topic of openness online is intricately tied to free licenses and open source software, this is not so for other educators. In a way, this shouldn't come as a surprise, Lund University for example is just full of proprietary software. The faculty of science just bought licenses for the second alternative to moodle since I arrived. I'm not sure what will happen to the material on the old platform, but I guess it will burn. 

And now for something slightly different

Obviously, this blog has been dormant for quite a while. I will now revive it, but for the time being with posts in english. The reason is that I for the next few months, I'm taking a didactics course called "Open Networked Learning". The course itself is a collaboration between different universities all over the globe with participants from Sweden, South Africa, Pakistan and many more countries. During it, we are asked to reflect on the different topics on a blog. So the character of the blog posts will also be less explainy and more reflecty, with me being a bit clueless. Have fun!