“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams
And tomorrow we have Christmas eve – my mental deadline for this course. I know it just doesn’t correlate with the official timetable, but I will give it a try. I sort of knew when I signed up for this that I did not really have time just now, but I wanted to better myself as a teacher online and learn new skills. And looking in the rear-view mirror I was right, sitting here typing my last blog text – and even that by combining the last two – topic four and five…
First of all I will reflect on blended learning, topic 4, and this is actually closer to my comfort zone. I use mixed methods in my teaching and also design my courses with quite a lot of on-line material and assignments. And this is also one of the reasons I signed up for this journey, I feel my material on the digital platform isn’t enough and sometimes doesn’t really help the students in the learning process. It is not motivating and when I observe the student’s use of the material I post it is not sufficient (at least not for me) and we do have to repeat and go through it in class.
During the discussions and our own learning path on blended learning I got a lot of good ideas on how to think. I stumbled before on constructive learning but now I got more tools and theory about it. Constructive alignment (Biggs) is basically how I have been working with most of my courses – Constructive meaning that my students are constructing meaning and knowledge through different learning activities – Alignment pointing to the different tasks and assignments I design for the students to achieve the learning outcome.
I will keep this blog short, it is weeks since the last PBL sessions and I do need to wrap this up – I can only say that blended learning and also designing parts of my courses to be online was one of the main reasons for me to take this course (as stated earlier). And I did get much to think about – planning tools, steps to take in both designing and assessing courses. I will use what I have learned planning my courses already next semester – first of all make the courses I teach better and better and try new things – iterating.
The thoughts naturally went into topic five, about what I have learned and what to do in the future. I feel I learned more about myself than anything else, my mindset towards the online world, which was pretty open to begin with, has become more lenient and I think I also got more courage experimenting with different tools and formats.
I know I only started the journey and I will continue on this path – I need to and I want to. Having another go with this course would definitely deepen the knowledge and would be a good thing, maybe sometimes in the future. For now I will experiment on my own and use the tools I learned about during this course and also explore new ones. I am happy I did take the advantage to do this, even though I didn’t have time enough to do it properly.
Over and out and happy holidays to all of you
Biggs, John: Aligning teaching for constructing learning. The Higher Education Academy (https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/id477_aligning_teaching_for_constructing_learning.pdf)