Where do I go from here?
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (namesake of Frankfurt University)
The most important things that I have learnt
A central aspect that I have learnt throughout this course is that online teaching needs a proper planning and a thought through didactical concept. When referring to my own experiences (I tried to reflect on them in all my blog posts so far) I almost always could apply theories, models or research findings that have been discussed in this course. The aspect of online learning being a social process was highlighted in several modules and the Community of Practice approach (e.g., Wenger, 2010) as well as the Community of Inquiry framework (Vaughan et al., 2013) will help me to reflect my teaching concepts and didactical strategies in in the future. Concerning my own digital literacy, I shifted remarkably from a centre position between being a visitor or resident in digital environments (White & Le Cornu, 2011). In my first bog post, I defined myself as a traveller in that sense. Now, after having established my own learning blog and having collected some experience as a “learning journalist” I would say that my learning curve was very high in the sense of becoming more of a resident. The most inspiring and potentially helpful and handy tools to me were provided in module 4. When telling a colleague about the Five-Stage-Model (Salmon, 2013) and the Constructive Alignment approach (Biggs, 2014) I described them as “quick references” that can help us to check the quality of our online teaching easily and “on the go”.
How will my learning influence my practice?
When working “offline” in the classroom or lab I put a lot of emphasize on the social aspects and it is very important to me to allow my students to become a community or (as I call it) a “learning team”. In the future I will highlight this aspect more in my online teaching practice. The blended learning activities and the understanding of the social, cognitive, and teaching presence provide a more than fruitful direction here. The most remarkable change concerning my own teaching will be the constant reflective monitoring of my own teaching behaviour and the consideration of interactivity amounts of the students and the necessity and intensity of teacher-learner interaction in different phases of an online course. This needs to be taken into account when designing a course didactically but also when organizing the process and the own workload. I realized in this course, that time management and workload organization reached a new dimension in the past 12 months. The models and tools I acquired here will help me to structure my activities in the sense of a high online teaching quality but at the same time concerning my “teacher workload efficacy”. Here, the article of Hodges et al. (2020) on the difference between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning cured some self-doubts and dysfunctional beliefs on my own teaching competency after the COVID teaching crisis (e.g., Marek et al, 2021).
My thoughts about using technology to enhance learning/teaching in my own context
I am in an experimental phase concerning my own online teaching. The good thing is I think it will, from now on, always be like that. The strength of digital environments is their adaptability and the short latency in reaction when contextual factors change – that being said: get over it, Kai. Every course you teach will be a new concept, even though the framework is the same. In this lies the big chance of online learning environments. At the same time and with all respect: I think we have just started to work on structures and guidelines for teaching and learning content in collaborative learning environments. It is not a problem to provide the students 16 articles to read until the next online course meeting. Effective teaching? I doubt that. We can set up a forum discussion for every topic we work on in the course and encourage the students to “discuss”. Does that work? Not so convinced. Why? We could ask them to provide at least two entries per week and forum to pass the course. I am sure, I would receive tons of emails asking on how long the entries need to be and (comprehensibly) what the writing guidelines for a “forum entry” in psychology are – APA does not provide guidelines for that yet. In other words: when the medium changes, the requirements for the content need to be adapted just as rapidly. When content is produced throughout a course (e.g., through interactive collaboration that mostly will lead to text to read and to react on) we need to establish guidelines on forms of these texts and make the amount digestible for students and four us as teachers. Padlets, Mentimeter, forum discussions, recording a Power Point presentation is not the challenge to my students anymore. They are so “twitter” already (“Kai, can I take a Snap with you and post it on my channel?” – I was blushing but agreed) When it comes to content management and content best practice, we need to continue our discussions and negotiations in the teacher community to provide clear and structured guiding to our students here. And this dialogue and discussion will need to go on for ever – fortunately.
What suggestions do I have for development of eLearning in my own teaching and context
As stated above, we will need to define clear and transparent requirements on new formats of academic communication that will affect the collaboration in online teaching environments as well. In psychology, we know exactly how a research article is structured, how a poster is designed and how we organize and carry out a conference presentation. To my knowledge there are no guidelines for a “forum impulse” or “online 5-slider” yet. As academic teaching follows the formats of academic communication that are common in a field a standard for online content production is missing yet. This can lead to frustration (c.f., Capdeferro & Romero, 2012) because requirements are not clear or transparent, instructions can be contradictive, or be very different between courses and teachers. Consequently, I call for a unique standard in content creation and production in collaborative online learning requirements that save us teachers resources as we do not have to be explicit and detailed when describing tasks, requirements, and expected outcomes and at the same time to students as they need to know exactly what to do. I refer to the Constructive Alignment approach here (e.g., Biggs, 2014). A similar “standardization” should be established for expected outcomes in online group work to make the time spent in synchronous formats fruitful and effective. Much too often the group work results stemming from numerous breakout room sessions are of questionable didactical value for the group while consuming a significant share of the valuable synchronous teaching time. A standard would be helpful here and the courage of the teachers to skip the presentation in plenary when appropriate. Another field of development is the application of synchronous online learning activities in higher education apart from break out room discussions. A helpful “quarry” to me is the 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics by ITL Research (n.d.).
References
Biggs, J. (2014). Constructive alignment. HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 1, 25.
Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44
Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. Educause, accessed 18 May 2021, [https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning]
ITL Research (n.d.). 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. Accessed 18 May 2021, [e240da11-07c2-4633-a86e-06c12f00d8ad (eun.org)]
Marek, M. W., Chew, C. S., & Wu, W. C. V. (2021). Teacher experiences in converting classes to distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (IJDET), 19(1), 40-60.
Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model [Homepage]
Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Athabasca University Press.
Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London
White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).