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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This week I am going to write about the article 'Instructional quality of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)' I had read a little about MOOCs for previous modules, mainly on the subject of student motivations (or lack of) to complete courses on MOOCs. I have done a few courses on MOOCs myself. I finished a couple of short Spanish courses on FutureLearn, but the majority of courses I took, I'm ashamed to say, went unfinished. Whether this was due to the quality of the instruction I received or my own motivations, I'm not sure. I'm inclined to say that I did learn a little from the modules I completed, but I simply did not have the incentive to finish the course. Maybe I need some 'push' factors, such as the fact that I invested money in the class (for example, I will always complete short courses that I have paid for), or maybe I need a specific time slot to do the course each week so it becomes part of my routine. This study analysed the instructional quality of 76 MOOCs using the criteria based on 'First Principles of Instruction' by Merrill (2013, cited in Margaryan, Bianco and Littlejohn, 2015). I must admit, I hadn't come across these principles before, and as the authors suggest, it is difficult to find a comprehensive framework to address instructional quality. The study found that most MOOCs achieved a low score on the majority of the principles. I was surprised that 'In 68/76 courses, learning activities did not require learners to relate the course material to their prior knowledge and skills' (Margaryan, Bianco and Littlejohn, 2015, p.80). This is something that is a key principle in English language teaching to activate students' prior knowledge so that they will remember content better and relate to it more deeply. It has become a part of my teaching philosophy, so it was surprising that so many of the courses didn't address this principle. One shortcoming of this study is that it doesn't explore the real experiences of MOOC users. It would be interesting to follow it up with a qualitative study which explores the perceptions of those who took the course to their own learning. The instruction is just one side of what we can see about the quality of the course, and without the learners themselves we can't get the full picture. It is certainly interesting to think deeply about whether MOOCs are providing good quality learning opportunities for students. Perhaps this is part of the reason that I dropped out of the MOOC courses I took, although I was not really conscious of it at the time. I'm not sure, because learning is tiring, I may still have dropped out, for example if I was collaborating more with my peers, I could learn more, but it may take more of my time. Reference:
I found this week's reading to be particularly fascinating, and although I didn't know a huge amount on the subject, the article really opened by eyes and changed my perceptions about free online resources. The Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement gives open access to education and information in the form of online resources for learning, teaching or researching. OER are generally found online for free and open to anyone, with many institutions uploading content, gaining recognition from UNESCO. However, Knox (2013) points out that assumptions have been made about OER in its presentation in the media and the academic literature on the subject. He has highlighted five important criticisms of OER.
References Biesta, G. J. (2013). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), 35-49. Knox, J. (2013). Five critiques of the open educational resources movement. Teaching in Higher Education,18(8), 821-832. Todd, S. (2015). The People: The rise and fall of the working class. London: John Murray. We never want to make our students feel 'othered' but this is something that adult educators need to admit can happen in our classes.
This week I am going to write about the article 'Othering in Online Learning' by Phirangee and Malec. This is a qualitative study of six online students and their experiences of feeling like the 'other' in online courses that they were enrolled in. The aim is to consider the underlying reasons why students might experience a sense of isolation in online learning, even when the teacher attempts to build a social presence in the online classroom. The authors highlight that many online students feel isolated, and there are high drop-out rates. Perhaps if we can understand these tendencies, we can begin to think about how we can improve the motivation of students to participate in online learning by facilitating a deeper connection with the content and their peers. The authors categorise three different types of 'other' that were uncovered through their research:
'our participants were othered through work obligations, academic expectations, and ethnic identities that were in misalignment with their peers, their instructors, and the course con- tent.' (Phirangee and Malec, 2017, p.169). Although these students did not actually drop out of their courses, it was a possibility that their feelings may have led them to do so. I thought that this article was an interesting study of online learners and uncovered some reasons for 'othering' that I personally found surprising. As a language teacher, I am already conscious of the possibility for ethnic and linguistic othering in the classroom. For example, if you are teaching a class of multi-lingual students, it is very likely that students will want to group themselves with peers who speak the same language as them. This can lead to othering of those who do not share languages with their classmates, as was the case in the article. I was particularly surprised by the academic othering that was experienced by two of the participants. These students felt that they were othered because they had different academic expectations to their peers. One felt that their classmates were only concerned about getting their own points of view across, while the other felt that the discussions were not challenging enough. They both blamed peers for not creating discussions that they felt were in line with their own academic expectations. I thought this was interesting, as it is quite subjective. I wonder how the other classmates felt about these two participants. Could other people in the class have felt othered too, by those who have higher academic expectations, who might think classmates are 'naval gazing' (Phirangee and Malec, 2017, p.167)? Perhaps one way that this example could be countered would be to give clear guidelines of expectations for interactions in forums. Then it could reduce the instances of students posting content that they think will get them a good mark, but rather responding to one another in a constructive way to build an effective social presence. However, it could go the other way, with more rigid guidelines limiting the creative freedom of online students, and thus still perpetuating possible feelings of isolation. In my personal experience of online learning, I was quite happy with the way that we were given examples of 'good' forum interactions from our tutor. We also got clarifications and feedback from him when we were unsure. Perhaps my class is a unique case, as a 'meta' online learners who are learning about online learning! Students studying other subjects online may not have so much awareness of the academic expectations, which could lead to some learners becoming marginalised in discussions. The authors admit that one limit of this study is that they only interviewed six participants. Morrow (2005, p. 255) has suggested that it is more important in a qualitative study to focus on procedure and depth in the interview than sample size. but perhaps this study is limited in that each category of 'other' only had two interviewees. Perhaps a future study could look at interviewing one particular category, for example people from minority ethnic groups in online contexts. References
This week in our teaching online course, we read about the various roles of adult educators and learners. Since I started this Master's in Adult Education, I have realised that, like many fields, there is a huge variety of language used to refer to almost all aspects of education. It becomes fashionable or unfashionable to use certain words in the literature, for example, are we talking about 'adult education' or 'life-long learning'? Am I a 'teacher', an 'educator', or a 'facilitator of learning' and do I work with 'students' or 'learners'? I am quite often guilty of using these words inter-changeably and it warrants thinking about the use of them more deeply.
This week I read Giving Teaching back to Education by G. Biesta. Biesta is extremely critical of what he sees as the decline of teaching, and increase in what he refers to as the 'language of learning' (Biesta, 2013, p.36). Although he writes this in counter to conservative arguments that the teacher should gain more control and authority. He feels that constructivist perspectives in educational discourse have facilitated a move from the actvities of the teacher to those of the student. The important conclusion from this paper is 'that teachers should teach, that they should be allowed to teach, and that they should have...the courage to teach' (Biesta, 2013, p.45). I agreed with many of Biesta's ideas, particularly with regards to not putting quotas on teachers. Biesta is heavily critical of pedagogies that refer to 'facilitation of learning'. I do agree that a teacher has an important guiding role to play in the classroom. I disagree however, that constructivist changes to the language of learning have "repositioned the teacher from someone who is at the heart of the educational process to one who literally stands at the sideline in order to facilitate the learning of his or her 'learners'" (Biesta, 2013, p.38). I do not think pedagogies that are concerned with learner-centredness really do place the teacher as simply a 'by-stander' in the classroom. In my professional experience, I actually think it is usually more work for the teacher to create learning that is student-centred. Although it may not look like the teacher is standing at the front of the room, with all eyes on them, they are still central in designing the activities that will facilitate learning, deciding the order that they will happen in, designating groups etc. Their voice may not be the loudest at all times in the class, but they are still teaching. He suggests that when we 'learn from' our teachers in this way, that they are 'structurally at the same level as a book' (Biesta, 2013, p.42). I disagree, because a teacher is still human, and not neutral. Even if they choose to use student-centred tasks, or are concerned about their student's learning they can build knowledge together, which we cannot do with a book. I do agree that there are changes being made to curriculums that are sidelining teachers, but I don't see this coming from constructivist paradigms. I do understand that this is part of what Biesta means about letting teachers teach. I think a tightly controlled curriculum or increasing targets for teachers that prevent them from freedom to create the lessons that they want to is certainly a bad thing, but I perceive it as coming from a different place that Biesta suggests. When I first read this article I was quite strongly opposed to much of it, but after a conversation with one of my classmates I went back and reconsidered. I do think it is saying something important for us as adult educators. Perhaps I get frustrated when we spend a long time on semantics. Perhaps because I lean more towards the interpretivist/constructivist paradigm I felt protective. I think balance is important here, Biesta is right, teachers should be allowed to teach, but not at the expense of students learning. In my opinion, teachers and students should learn from and teach one another. The teacher is never side-lined, but I like the thinking of critical pedagogy on this, that we 'must emphasise the collective dimension of of learning and knowledge creation - reading and transforming the world together' (English and Mayo, 2012, p.128). A quote from one of my former teachers! References Biesta, G. J. (2013). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6 (2), 35-49. English, L. and Mayo, P. (2013). Learning with Adults. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. This week I read about some different learning theories. Some were familiar to me, such as behaviourism and social contructivism, but one was new, that of connectivism. What's connectivism? Connectivism is an attempt to come up with a learning theory for a digital age, with many learning theories developed before we had access to online learning tools. It has some key points:
Some of the principles reminded me of Vella's discussion of quantum thinking:'It is a shock for most of us to consider a universe composed of energy that is patterned and spontaneous, the certainty of uncertainty, “both/and” thinking, and the connectedness of everything.' (Vella, 2002, p.29) Digital storytelling This week we had the opportunity to work in a group to make a piece of digital content to discuss a learning theory that we chose. I worked with my classmate Mari to make a 'digital storybook' that helped to explain some of the theories in an accessible way. We used the website Storybird to create a picture book. This site provides access to illustrations by fantastic artists and the ability to easily construct a book that can be shared online. We chose an artist called Oya, who is a German and Turkish illustrator. If you'd like to see more of her art, you can find her profile on storybird here. I found this process to be fun and informative. There is a challenge involved by making an academic topic into a story book, because information has to be consolidated and written in a simple way. We also experimented with using dialogue between our two characters to give a sense of the real-life dialogue that we had around the subject. We also wanted to pose the reader some questions, which we did in a playful way at the end of the story. I like this format because I don't believe adult learning always has to be serious, and it's nice to have some fun while you learn! The platform of Storybird might not work for everyone, and it was a little limiting in that the user has to stick to only one set of pictures, and you do not get much choice in fonts or have the chance to use any other creative styles (animations, hyperlinks etc.). But as a traditional story-telling format it works well, and the selection of art is great. You can find our story here. References
Bell, F. (2011). Connectivism: Its place in theory-informed research and innovation in technology-enabled learning. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(3), 98-118. Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3-10. Vella, J., (2002). Learning to listen, learning to teach: the power of dialogue in educating adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Last week I read about seamless learning. I had never heard of this kind of learning before, but it does combine learning theories that I am aware of.
What does 'Seamless' mean? The word 'seamless' implies learning that blends together and is smooth and without transition. This is part of seamless learning, and essentially it can be a combination of different learning, whether it be formal or informal that comes together to create a holistic, life-wide process for the learner. Technology plays a big part in the literature on seamless learning, with mobile and online learning facilitating learning, both inside and out of the classroom. This technology is how the learning can happen at any time, with smart phones allowing us to learn in a flexible way. Is it Blended Learning? At first I wondered, how is seamless learning different from blended learning? Particularly in English language teaching, blended learning is when formal educators use online resources to supplement classroom learning at home and thus combines face-to-face learning with technology (Hockley, 2018). It seems that seamless learning even goes beyond this. Although some of the literature suggests that it would still be linked to the formal classroom, seamless learning is not necessarily set by the teacher, and could involve learning that is more student-centred (Wong et al., 2015). My own experience of seamless learning Seamless learning, by its definition is happening all the time, across different contexts (Looi et al., 2012). It is even happening now, as I write this blog, which is a part of the learning process of an online class that I am taking. I read the materials assigned by the teacher. Next I posted some ideas and read my classmates ideas on a forum, I did a little of my own further research and then started writing this blog (while looking back at the reading and class discussions). And while we have new topics every week, I have found myself looking back at the older discussions and framing them in light of my new knowledge. It seeps into the other modules that I do, as my learning in an online environment reframes my perceptions of face to face discussions. If you, my readers leave a comment, we can even continue to build on this process through discussion of these ideas. Criticism My personal reservation, and one that cropped up from other classmates on the forum, about seamless learning, is that it works best when technology is involved, and is therefore exclusive. Although I think it could happen 'offline', certainly potential students of this course who did not have access to the internet would not be able to participate in the seamless learning that I have so far in this module. Perhaps because I have taught in contexts with poor internet access, I am wary about assuming that all learners have smart phones. References Hockly, N. (2018). Blended Learning. ELT Journal, 72(1), 97-101. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccx058 Looi, C. K., So, H. J., Chen, W., Zhang, B., Wong, L. H., & Seow, P. (2012). Seamless learning. In Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 2975-2979). Springer. Wong, L. H., Milrad, M., & Specht, M. (Eds.). (2015). Seamless learning in the age of mobile connectivity. Singapore: Springer. Last week marked the start of our IMAESC module in teaching adult education online. We had some interesting materials, online discussion and 'met' our tutor through web-conferencing software. I'm definitely looking forward to this module.
This is a bit of a test to see if I can have a blog for two subjects at once here!
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LaurenI am an IMAESC student, English teacher and adult education researcher from the UK. Categories
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