And another week has passed! Time goes really fast when you are busy

This week my group (PBL13) and I have tried – and succeeded! – to put together the first assignment. If you have not checked it yet, I strongly recommend you to do it. In our talk last Monday we decided to be a bit more personal, and to focus on the role of both the teacher and the student.

The first decision, i.e. to use a personal approach, may surprise some of you. However, I do think that using a personal perspective, rather than one more related to our professional self, make us interiorize the idea, as well as imagine how we felt in a similar situation as the one we are trying to describe. Those feelings are important because like that we can potentiate those “moments” (or ideas, tasks, structures, and digital literacies) that make us feel good, and may probably make our students feel good as well (although it is clear that one solution does not work for all). However, in my personal case, this personal perspective is more complicated than a professional one when it comes to deliver a specific task…

The second decision, to focus on the role of the teacher and the student makes totally sense for me. How are we going to be good teachers if we do not experience how our students feel, think and perceive an online course? I am a researcher in human physiology, and I have always thought that one should carry out in her/himself any experiment that plans to perform in a subject or patient. Like that, you will be able to explain it better and understand what that person is going through. The same applies to teaching/learning. And this is an important reason, apart from learning new knowledge, why teachers should “recycle” themselves and perform courses, to feel how to be a student is.

Have a great day!

/Rodrigo

Skyssernas Museum in Lund. Photo by Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalo