Our ONL 181 course has now officially come to an end and I thought that I would conclude my reflections on my online learning experience in a more pertinent way.

What came through clearly from the very outset is the importance of building trust and the socialisation aspect of online mediation.  ‘Trust and genuineness ….. Socialisation processes should be central, not incidental, to online learning design.’ (M. Northcote, 2008).

The group also agreed with the need for courses being “open”, i.e. granting access to all who feel that they can benefit from such courses.  For me this is particularly important as access to education has been identified as a key imperative in the South African context.  (B. Leibowitz and V. Bozalek, 2014)  We also identified the importance of building a team of instructors who could collaborate and develop open online teaching together, using shared Open Educational Resources (OEM) and sharing what has been created the by online mediators as OEM.

One of the topics that we explored as a group was “The learning blend:  Elements for effective online collaboration.’  Our discussions were inspired by the Community of Inquiry – COI (2007) framework.  The focus of the COI model is the social presence, cognitive presence and the teaching presence which collectively makes up the learning environment.  What we also learnt was that there are a number of appropriate online tools that can be used to enhance the learning environment e.g. ivideo, padlet, popplet, zoom etc.

I was thrilled to be a leader for Topic 4 – Design for online and blended learning.  We used Popplet as our tool (http://www.popplet.com/app/#/5043315) and this is when I really discovered the power of collaboration.  All members of our group contributed excellent ideas that eventually made up the final design.  We shared ideas on how to encourage online learners to be actively engaged, how to keep active students engaged and how to use constructive alignment (CA) as a basis for designing teaching/learning activities.   The inspiration for this design was drawn from the work of  Biggs, J. (1999)

We capitalised on lessons learnt in collaboration when presenting Topic 5 where each one of our group had to reflect on what was learnt from the course.  This time we used Padlet as our tool (https://padlet.com/ben07/pbl7).  

I can honestly say that this course has “flipped” my thinking about online learning.  The fact that the course itself was a practical lesson in online learning enhanced my understanding of how online learning should be looked at.  Once we got over the hurdle of being complete strangers when we started the course and gained each others trust we were able to take our learning to the next level.  The course also taught us the importance of staying committed, the power of synchronous meetings and also how much we could learn from each other once we started collaborating.  My understanding has evolved and dare I say it has matured during the course and I shall certainly take these lessons that I have learnt into my online class in 2019.

References:

1. Maria Northcote, Centre for Teaching and Learning’ University of Newcastle, NSW. Ascilite, 2008, Melbourne.
2. Brenda Leibowitz, Stellenbosch University and Vivienne Bozalek, University of the Western Cape, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, Volume 16, Number 1, May 2014, Access to higher education in South Africa: A social realist account.
3. Community of Inquiry Model (2007).
4. Biggs, J; Higher Education Research & Development, Vol. 18, No, 1999.