My most important insight from the ONL course is the power of group collaboration. The course designers have lead by example and allowed us to experience from the inside how to build a successful collaborative learning environment. Now, how can I proceed to put my new knowledge to work? I don’t teach online. In fact, … Continue reading “ONL insights for offline courses”

Throughout ONL181, it has struck me how the course design is in perfect sync with its content. When we discussed digital anxieties, for example, we came to the conclusion that the way to handle the problem is to do exactly what ONL181 does. Now, at an advanced stage of the course, we realize that the … Continue reading “ONL design with individual grades”

Oh, aren’t they annoying, those people who try to get the benefits without paying the cost? Who think they can just float by, without contributing? In online learning, a key idea is that education should be free and that it doesn’t cost anything to share knowledge. So if everything is free, there shouldn’t be a freerider … Continue reading “The freerider problem”

A hundred years ago, there was a tradition in the US that saloons would serve free lunch to guests who were paying for a drink. But the food would be salty, luring the customers to buy more beer. Based on this story, economists frequently use the expression “there’s no free lunch” to point out that … Continue reading “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”

The web is an amazing tool to work efficiently in the global research environment. For example, I can’t imagine what writing literature reviews was like before the search engines helped us to scan millions of PDFs. As I’ve already described in an earlier post, I am a keen user of twitter, wordpress, skype, and google … Continue reading “Digital (in)efficiency: A confession”

That fear of digital tools can undermine learning made me think about a topic that I encountered in a previous pedagogics course. Quant-phobia or statistical anxiety are terms describing how some students get mentally blocked when they see equations, calculations, or numbers. According to a study of US humanities, 75-80% of the students experience that their … Continue reading “Digital anxiety”

Why ONL? As a researcher I am a keen adopter of all the features the web has to offer. I have coauthors in the Netherlands, the UK, and the US, so Skype and Dropbox are natural part of everyday life. For each project, I log meeting and feedback notes, thoughts and decisions, in a log … Continue reading “Hello ONL!”