Topic four of Open Networked Learning was about good design to support learners in an online environment. It was interesting to learn about different frameworks to facilitate and support learning communities and discuss them in the the PBL group which has formed into such a learning community itself over the last two months of the course. It enabled us to compare the proposed frameworks based on quite a rich set of shared experiences. We were able to reflect what worked well and where we encountered difficulties, to think about how the ONL course design had supported this process and where it might be improved. What I personllay took away from thinking and discussion about design qustions, above all, is, though sound learning design is crucial, it cannot guarantee successful learning experiences. There are too many factors (motivation and personal goals, level of experience, time available, personal and professional obligations, etc.) depending on the individual members of the learning community that are impossible to consider – which makes a successful experience all the more fortunate!
The Community of Inquiry framework
In her webinar about designfor online learning, Martha Cleveland-Innes, Professor and Chair of Centre forDistance Education at Athabasca University and Affiliated Professor at KTHRoyal Institute of Technology, talked about the framework of Community of Inquiry and the participants seized the opportunity to discussbenefits and challenges of blended an online learning.
According to the
Communities of Inquiry (CoI; 2018) website, an educational CoI can be described
as follows:
“An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.
The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements – social, cognitive and teaching presence.”
(Communities of Inquiry, 2018, para. 1-2)
Sound learning design based
on the CoI framework ensures that these three elements are appropriately
developed to facilitate a successful educational experience:
Image retrieved from the Communities of Inquiry, 2018 website
Martha Cleveland-Innesfurther explained Social Presence as the ability to participate in the community and develop interpersonal relationships, Cognitive Presence the ability of learners to construct and confirm meaning in such a community ofinquiry, and Teaching Presence as the learning design that facilitates social and cognitive processes that lead to the intended learning outcomes.
Community of Inquiry combined with Salmon’s Five Stage Model
In our PBL group, wecombined the CoI framework with Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model to approachscenario 1 of ONL’s topic 4 (Salmon, 2013):
SCENARIO 1
“I am part of a team that runs a four weekcourse in how to be an online tutor. This course is designed to give our tutorsthe theory, research and practical experience of being both an online tutor anda student, to help them support their own distance learners. However, one of the questions we always get asked is how do you keep online learners actively engaged? We ask it of ourselves frequently because of the decreasing enthusiasmof our participants as the course goes on, and external pressures impact on their time. So we find this a real challenge, how to support and facilitate engagement and activity as well as systematic reflection throughout a wholecourse!”
(Open Networked Learning, 2018, Topic 4: Design for online and blendedlearning)
While CoI framework helps to describe and recognise the main areas of activity contributing to the educational experience, the Five Stage Model is very useful to design and evaluate several steps towards building an efficient and effective learning community. Combining both seemed to be a good approach for designing collaborative interactive learning and teaching in online environments. In our Prezi, we have collected the main elements of such a design along the five stages of Salmon’s model:
https://prezi.com/view/c1jz5MO7mxS7kD2DXmRx/