One of my experiences from the course, that might be out of scope for the real course content, is that there are many tools around that are aimed to facilitate learning, and the quality of the tools are quite shifting. However, new tools take time to learn and the time seems to be substantially different for different people. Because most courses are not about learning new tools, it is wise to use as few tools as possible, while still be able to implement the course in a relevant way. A few course participants might see the possibility to use new tools as exciting and therefore spend more time in participating in the course. However, many other course participants see the learning of new tools as a big burden that takes time and they therefore decrease their time spent on learning the real course content.
Another really important thing I have learned is The Five Stage Model For Online Learning [1] where “Access and Motivation” and “Online Socialization” are the two first steps in the model and that these two steps are really important. The first step is about welcoming and encouraging the student and to set up the learning systems and help the students to access the systems. The second step is about letting the students familiarizing with each other and let them communicate with each other. I usually teach in courses during the later years on longer educational programs and therefore the students I teach usually already know each other and the university quite well. They therefore mostly think that the course I teach is just another course in the program and would just get started with the course content instead of spending time on understand how the university and the university’s tooling works and to socialize with the people they already know. It is therefore easy to underestimate the importance of access, motivation and online socialization when designing or changing an online course.
It was also interesting to see how The blended learning design framework that presented how it is possible to use both low, medium and high impact approaches to transform a campus based course into an blended learning course. It is quite obvious that it is possible to transform a course step by step into a more and more blended course. However, the framework is a good illustration of how it can be done and gives good examples of different kinds of methods that changes the course to different extent.
Other parts of the course has been less interesting, because they are to a lesser extent applicable to my work or are things that I already were familiar with.
- Salmon, G (2013) The Five Stage Model. [Homepage] http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html
- City University London. (2016). The blended learning design framework. [Homepage] https://sleguidance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BL/pages/36962416/The+blended+learning+design+framework