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.<\/p>\n
What came through clearly from the very outset is the importance of building trust and the socialisation aspect of online mediation.\u00a0 ‘Trust<\/em>\u00a0and genuineness ….. Socialisation<\/em>\u00a0processes should be central, not incidental, to\u00a0online learning<\/em>\u00a0design.’ (M. Northcote, 2008).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 For me this is particularly important as access to education has been identified as a key imperative in the South African context.\u00a0 (B. Leibowitz and V. Bozalek, 2014)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n One of the topics that we explored as a group was “The learning blend:\u00a0 Elements for effective online collaboration.’\u00a0 Our discussions were inspired by the Community of Inquiry – COI (2007) framework.\u00a0 The focus of the COI model is the social presence, cognitive presence and the teaching presence which collectively makes up the learning environment.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I was thrilled to be a leader for Topic 4 – Design for online and blended learning.\u00a0 We used Popplet as our tool (http:\/\/www.popplet.com\/app\/#\/5043315<\/a>)<\/strong><\/em> and this is when I really discovered the power of collaboration.\u00a0 All members of our group contributed excellent ideas that eventually made up the final design.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0The inspiration for this design was drawn from the work of\u00a0 Biggs, J. (1999)<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 This time we used Padlet as our tool (https:\/\/padlet.com\/ben07\/pbl7<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I can honestly say that this course has “flipped” my thinking about online learning.\u00a0 The fact that the course itself was a practical lesson in online learning enhanced my understanding of how online learning should be looked at.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n References:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n 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… Continue reading Final reflection!!!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":332,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1007,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions\/1007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n