Month: March 2019

When I think about learning environments, the first thing that comes to mind is the traditional class room. A room with tables and chairs, and a board were the teacher is standing. When working on the presentation I released that it can be broaden to include a number of aspects, not only the physical room. In the era of blended learning there are many new learning environments to discover. This lead to the conclusion that there are two major learning environments in this course: the class room and online. However, within these two there are several options to create diverse environments for learning.

As the course I am working on is partly distance, the possibilities for traditional class room learning environments are limited and most of the activities are online. We have half a day in the beginning and half a day in the end where we meet in real life, the rest are various digital environments. This obligates for the time in class being well spent.

During the time in-between meetings the learning environment is mainly Canvas and the speed grader function within Canvas. Looking at it like this, as an online classroom, highlights the importance of the digital learning environment. As a teacher in higher education, the support you get on how to organise these rooms are limited. This is also expressed in the literature, education is not driving the digital development and there is a lack of sharing culture were good ideas aren’t spread. Something to work on in the future!

My presentation on learning environment:

For me, digital competence is a means in academic teaching and an important part of contemporary pedagogical development. We need to step up in order to keep up with the students and how they use technology, without losing focus on the pedagogical content and didactics of the actual subject. I enjoyed reading Mozelius and Hettiarachchi (2017) and reflecting on the origin of blended learning. This concept that you hear a lot about, and in the past I almost attributed something magical to it. In the article they state that blended learning can be almost anything, and that the problem with such a broad definition is that in the end it says nothing. Therefore, a more fruitful way of defining it would probably be to add that the digital activities should contribute to students learning and the alignment of the course.

An obstacle with blended learning is that student satisfaction tents to be low and distance courses generally have a higher dropout rate. Chen and Yao (2016) mapped factors affecting learner’s satisfaction and concluded the design aspect to be most influential, surpassing the importance of instructor, course, technology, and environment. A successful design, which includes perceived usefulness and ease of use, made for the learners to devote their attention to learning the content instead of having to learning a complicated system. The participants in this study were young, around 20 years of age. Therefore, the results may not be directly transferable to other age groups. However, we can conclude that for blended learning to work one important aspect is that the digital tools are easy to use.

If we state that learning takes place in the interaction of humans, a successful online courses requires to compensate for loss of personal interaction. Garner and Rouse (2016) found that a combination of digital online components and face to face interaction influenced the students learning experience in a positive manner. To improve learner satisfaction the online components where do be “low technology solutions”, such as personal feedback or individual mails, rather than tweets or filmed lectures (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2014). This provides useful input to the pedagogical development within digital competence.

I have chosen to work on the Public Safety lll course which is included in the MASTERS program in Risk and Environmental Studies. It is the third and final course, covering the subject of public safety within the program. The course is built on part one and two, following a (hopefully) logical order. Basic epidemiology, describing and interpreting injury data, constitutes the first part. The second course include measures of injury prevention and the theories behind it. Leading up to the third (the one I have chosen to work on) that focuses on implementation and evaluation of prevention.

It is an online course with a campus meeting at the beginning and end. The students choose a subject to work with during the course and hand in their project in five steps, getting feedback/feed forward after every step. Using this type of formative assessment is quite demanding for both teachers and students, but also a very effective learning tool. I would like to develop this and try to integrate more digital tools into the feedback/feed forward process. I am thinking of on line meetings with the students or doing video recordings in order to pass on my point of view on their work.

Chen, W. S., & Yao, A. Y. T. (2016). An Empirical Evaluation of Critical Factors Influencing Learner Satisfaction in Blended Learning: A Pilot Study. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 4(7), 1667-1671.

Dunlap, J. C., & Lowenthal, P. R. (2014). The power of presence: Our quest for the right mix of social presence in online courses. Real life distance education: Case studies in practice, 41-66.

Garner, R., & Rouse, E. (2016). Social presence–connecting pre-service teachers as learners using a blended learning model. Student Success, 7(1), 25-36.

Mozelius, P., & Hettiarachchi, E. (2017). Critical Factors for Implementing Blended Learning in Higher Education. International Journal of Information and Communication Technologies in Education, 6(1), 4-18.