This week I am going to write my reflections on the process of designing a mini online course with a group of my IMAESC classmates. This was an exciting assignment, because our instructor created a real platform on which we could use Moodle to create our own online courses. I really appreciated the chance to be able to do this. There can often be a disconnect between theory and reality, and often we can talk about things that we would like to do in theory, but aren't given the opportunity to experiment with how they would work in practice. I have used Moodle as a student, and a little bit as a teacher, but I didn't receive great training in how to use it at the time. This meant I often neglected it. I found this version of Moodle very easy to use, once I watched some of the instruction videos on Youtube. We were tasked with coming up with our own mini-course, for which we chose everything; the topic, audience, pedagogy, assessment methods... which seemed like a big challenge at first! We created a whatsapp group and google folder to help us arrange things, but our best tactic for talking about these issues was having face-to-face meetings in our group. I was extremely happy with the way that my group worked together, I felt that everyone listened to each other and was respectful of others' views and came up with interesting ideas that stuck to the task. The first suggestion was from Yumi, who wanted to do a cooking course. The rest of the group thought that this could be a little difficult to do in an online course, and wouldn't tap into much of our pedagogical knowledge. Thiago suggested that we could use the topic of the environment, as he used to be a geography teacher, he knows a lot about this subject. Although I am not an expert on this subject, I believe it is one of the most important issues facing humans right now, and felt that I might be able to expand my knowledge by developing this course. I hope that Yumi didn't mind that her initial suggestion was out-voted. When working in a group it is a difficult balance between listening to others' ideas and allowing them to bloom and getting across your own ideas. This is one of the reasons I felt that this group worked well, because everyone did listen to each other. I wonder if this was also something to do with the fact that we have already been classmates for a year, and know each other quite well. Anyway, I was grateful to have them as my team-mates! When we had decided our topic, we thought that our audience could be adult educators. This would stick to what we knew about, and meant it might be useful for us in the future. When we said this in our subsequent meeting with our instructor, he told us that it would be better to be more specific about the audience for the course. 'What kind of adult educators'? So when we met next, this was the question on our lips. However, I think in our quest to 'narrow down' our audience, we somehow made it too narrow. We decided on adult educators working with migrants. But in our feedback from Andreas, he told us that we would have to make the topic of environmental issues explicitly related to migrants. But we were really only able to justify it in terms of the fact that it is important for everyone in communities to have an understanding of environmental issues and what they can do about them. Our criticism from our tutor meant that we were in a difficult situation. We met again, and were trying to relate the issues more specifically to migrants, but we didn't want to have a top-down approach, in which we told migrants that they should recycle more etc. We wanted to be more critical, using a social-constructivist pedagogic model to allow the students to build knowledge together. But this was very difficult to explicitly relate to one group in a community. We realised it might be better to broaden our audience to community educators. What we wanted to discuss was going to involve the whole community, not just migrants, which made it hard to relate our objectives specifically to. This was a challenge, because we had to change some of the work we had already done, but this feedback from our tutor definitely improved the quality of our course. Because the course consists of four weeks, we decided it would be the fairest split of the work-load if one group member took charge of one week each. Together we came up with our learning objectives and pedagogy, and then individually we went out and found content and wrote questions for our particular topic. We then met together again when this was mostly finished to make sure that there was a natural flow between our weeks and a consistent format. I was worried that this might be a huge challenge, because we all have unique styles of structuring our work. We had a meeting to talk about our different sections, but actually found it pretty easy to agree on how we would make our course flow nicely. For example I had initially put my learning materials as links at the end of my week, but I noticed that Thiago had incorporated them as hyperlinks in a list, which meant he could include them before the discussion questions. This made sense to the natural flow of the course so we agreed to all do this in our weeks. I had to tweak my content, but was happy to do so to make sure that the course had a flow that would work better for the students. I think it would be confusing to me if I did a course which had a different lay-out each week. Designing this course was a practical exercise in how to apply social constructivist pedagogy to an online format. We have already learned about how it is important to build a social and cognitive presence in addition to the teaching presence, in order to build an effective educational experience online (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007). We decided that we wanted to try to foster a social presence by using forum discussion questions that were designed to have students share and build knowledge together. This is also in the spirit of non-formal community education, so we anticipated that this would be appropriate for our target students who worked in this field. However, this involves careful consideration about discussion questions that will stimulate effective dialogue between the students. A closed question like 'have you seen this in your community?' could stimulate a short yes/no response. On the other hand, a question that is too complicated or overly difficult might be off-putting to students to respond to. We each thought carefully about the questions for our weeks, and gave each other feedback about them. We also decided to ask students to create a blog so that they could engage in critical reflection about the course. Reflection has been seen as important in bridging the gap between surface level and deep learning, in which the learner can try to apply the meaning of materials to their previous knowledge (Moon, 2004). We knew that this would be an important element for our target students, because they would each be bringing the unique and complex understandings of their own communities. Interestingly, it is these components of dialogue with peers and critical reflection that I feel make our course different from existing online courses about environmental issues. It is these specific factors of our pedagogical design that mean that community educators can together build the awareness of environmental issues that is necessary for them to be able to apply them to their contexts. Because reflection is a crucial component of building a professional identity for adult educators, this element relates the topics that we brought about the environment to their professional context. Additionally, the course calls for this approach because only the learners themselves are aware of the specific needs of their communities. If I were designing an online course in the future, I think I could apply a lot of what I learned during this process, along with deeper understandings that I gained from the course in general. The biggest challenge in our group was trying to specify a target audience and make sure that our course offered something new. We managed to fine-tune these areas during the design process of the course and I think that we overcame the hurdle. However, in the future it would save time and be much more helpful to have a clearer idea about these before the design process started. Personally, I liked the experience of planning with a group of my peers, and I hope that I might be able to do that in future in my work. I also know that I was lucky to have such a nice group to work with, and I hope that I was able to walk the difficult line between expressing my ideas and not speaking over others. I think communication was central to this pleasant working experience. It's also certainly helpful to bounce ideas off one another and to share the responsibilities and challenges together. I think to get the fullest picture of the effectiveness of our course, the next step would be to see how it would work in practice, with real students enrolled in it. In my teaching experience, there are always unforeseen hurdles that come up in reality, when you get to the classroom, and I feel that an online course is no different. Would the students get involved in the forums? Would our decision not to include face-to-face classes in order to keep the course flexible backfire, and de-motivate them? Those would be some of my worries, and part of the process would be flexibility in listening to students responses' and needs as the course progressed. Teachers need to know when to step in and when to listen, and these can only be practiced in the process of a real course. I don't know yet whether I will be an online teacher in the future, but it's definitely something that I've become more interested in, during the process of this course in teaching online! References
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We had quite a range of seminars for the placement, facilitated by different organisations of adult education in Tallinn.
On Saturday the culture steppers took a trip to the open air museum! This museum is a short bus journey out of the city centre and I definitely recommend that you visit it. Katrin from the Estonian institute told us that Estonians love to come here and that there are many events here throughout the year! So this museum is a must if you would like to learn more about Estonian history and culture! This museum uses a few unique ways to help people discover more about Estonian history. it's great to be able to learn outdoors, and since the natural world is such a big part of Estonian culture, it makes sense that this museum combines a museum with nature. There are numerous traditional Estonian buildings, many of them are original structures from the nineteenth century, relocated to the museum. It really felt like I was stepping back in time exploring them! We split into small groups and followed an adventure using our smartphones. This had a map of the museum and various puzzles to solve once we reached the locations on the map. This was a cool way to help us to interact with the objects and also the people working in the museum! I won't spoil the puzzles for you, but I will share a picture of one of the objects we found that was part of the trail - the Lestovka, used for prayer in the Russian orthodox tradition. Later, the people working in the museum told us about some of the traditions at the Setu farm part of the museum site. As I've already mentioned, I love to learn about culture through food, and today was no exception. We got to drink some tea prepared in a traditional way, with some sugar that stays in your mouth while you drink. We also tried a traditional cake, which was apparently very healthy! There are some goats living next to the farm house, so we also said hello to them! There was a small exhibition on various cultures living in Estonia, including Russians, Armenians and Polish among many other nationalities. We were encouraged to research a particular group and then to share what we found with the rest of our party. It was really great to see that we were encouraged to learn about even more cultures living in Estonia! This was a fantastic learning experience and if you want to visit the museum I strongly encourage you to do so! I will try to go again before I leave because there wasn't time to see everything there because it is so big! The rest of the culture steppers will have another chance to visit in a couple of weeks, so I hope they will take the opportunity (I'll add some of my pictures on the facebook group to show anyone who didn't go this time how interesting it was)!
Hours this week at placement: 6 hours |
LaurenI am an IMAESC student, English teacher and adult education researcher from the UK. Categories
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