Module 2 – Week 4: Working with the Online Learner (Joerdis Facilitator Lead)
Dear all,
I am exited to be taking you through our second module: Working with the Online Learner as your facilitator lead. Many of you have shared earlier how interested you were to learn more about effective strategies that engage online learners with the content, the online interface, their peers and the instructor.
I hope to have addressed your interest by designing learning activities that help you facilitate equitable and fair courses which are also welcoming, energizing, and empowering for your learners.
If you look at the screenshot from our FLOf Course Introduction, the learning activities of the next two weeks are scaffolded to align with the following three of the five overall course outcomes.
In addition, I would like to highlight the core facilitator skills you can build and enhance in weeks 4 and 5 by guiding your focus to the screenshot below:
We will apply the principles of a learner-centered facilitation, which you will be learning more about in Week 4, by encouraging you as the responsible online learners to effectively collaborate with each other for some of the learning activities.
This leads me to add a disclaimer about the fact that you might notice a sense of surprise relating to the innovative nature of the collaborative activities I designed for Module 2 so as to have you explore new pedagogical approaches to enrich your facilitation practice. Please read the instructions for those activities very closely. If one of you leaves an inquiry post in our OPEN FORUM that you can answer already, don’t wait for us instructors to respond, but feel free to share your helpful insights into the navigation of the “new” collaborative environments with your peers.
Last but not least, I would like to highlight the fact that Open Access Week is in its 12th year this week, which is what has inspired me to make exclusive use of open educational practices, resources and tools in this unit.
If you are relatively new to the worlds of Open Education and Open Access, you will naturally need more time to familiarize yourself with some of the tools or the steps in the activities. I do not want to overwhelm you, nor do I choose the technologies merely because they are open. Instead I choose open practices because they provide a student-centered, collaborative learning experience without compromising ownership or control. By taking you into open and judgement-free spaces where you can learn, test and compare tools I hope to empower you as online facilitators and I will do my best to support you in building your innovative online facilitation strategies.
Three out of the five activities this week can be completed any time before Sunday at midnight. The other two require some time management, so please access the schedule for the learning activities and due dates this week (4) linked here to make time for your contributions.
I look forward to our open exchanges this week.
Joerdis
optional OFFER to attend a VIRTUAL OFFICE HOUR this week to discuss your technology needs
Dear all,
I realise that some of you might need some help with the set-up and/ or navigation of the new educational tech tools that are being introduced this week.
The time slots I can offer are:
1. Friday, October 25 at 8 pm
2. Saturday, October 26 at 2 pm
3. Saturday, October 26 at 8 pm
If you’d like to attend any of the 3 suggested student hours, please indicate your interest to participate in this Moodle poll here:
https://moodle.uleth.ca/long_term/mod/choice/view.php?id=19674&forceview=1
I will then send you a live-webinar conference link.
____________________________
If you cannot attend, but do indeed have questions, please share them with us prior to the first session on Friday at 8 pm.
Dear all,
This week is moving in big strides and it is Thursday already. I hope I haven’t sent too many of you into the loop of inaccessibility because of my lesson design. If you have struggled accessing the individual activities, please see my instructions for navigating our course resource pack here (it’s a moodle page explaining your options).
I have seen some of you joined the Wikipedia Classroom as asked in Activity 4.1 already. May I ask you how smooth the sign-up process was for you there?
If you haven’t yet gotten to watching the lecture in 4.2 (which was due yesterday), do not worry about it too much, but rather move ahead and get started on the reading set for this week, because it is the base for our web annotation discussion in 4.3, for which you will be using an OER tool called Hypothes.is.
Please do not hesitate to point out any inconsistencies in the materials/ instructions to you as soon as you see them to allow us to make immediate improvements.
With regards to the lecture questions posed, I want to quickly let you know that they do link us to the topic next week, when we will focus on the diversity in our online classrooms and the discussion of power dynamics is included.
I will be available all through the week (including the weekend), to join some of our discussions as well as answer any of the question you might have. Reach out through this channel, via email or Twitter (@JoerdisWeilandt) if you like,
Joerdis
Dear all,
What I hope Module 2 and its focus on our interactions with online learners has offered you so far are opportunities to explore specific practical ideas and tools for active learning in blended or wholly online environments.
This is not to mean that our offer for exploration of ‘new’ tools and methods in the FLOf 2019 course automatically comes with an expectation that you commit or subscribe to any of them henceforward. Instead I hope to have offered insights into “new” or different ways of working with online learners.
What I learned and appreciate in your feedback is its capacity to clearly show the importance of explicit instructions and expectations. Your comments have helped me realize some of my own shortcomings in the design of the module we are currently in. What it also highlights is the iterative nature of online teaching. Much like in classroom teaching, we go into it with a plan and a good sense of what might happen, only to learn that plans really only ever get you so far. Instead they call for an open mind in the teacher and the willingness to adapt that plan to the specificity of certain situations.
While I considered the recommendations for effective online course design as briefly laid out in Wagstaff (2015, chapter 37), I had to wait until the actual facilitation start of this first FLOf 2019 course to finally see which and why certain course elements turned out to be problematic for you, such as “staggered due dates”, “too many external links”, too high of a level of interactivity, too ambitious academic rigour, just to name a few. In a nutshell your challenges are a good representation of some of the common issues we encounter while working with students online.
Let me zoom in to the collection of challenges a little more closely by looking at the aspects of teaching that were realized through the use of digital technology in Module 2, namely
- the development of media information literacy, critical thinking and research and collaboration skills through the Wikipedia Assignment in 4.1
- note-taking skills and the reflection on learner-centered online course design in 4.2 (Please find a copy of your questions and my responses in the pdf attachment to this message)
- the collaborative annotation of an open text with an to practice the principles of Openness (i.e. commitment to use open-source technology, open data, and transparent scholarly inquiry) in 4.3.
- the provision of feedback on the FLOf design and facilitation in the survey in 4.4 (Please note that you can find the powerpoint report attached to this message)
- the collection of resources to orientate students to learning online in 4.5 (in which none of you engaged at this point)
What I would like to highlight is that like many of our students, we do not automatically develop digital literacy skills only because technology permeates many parts of our lives. Your feedback about the occasional discomfort in navigating new learning environments for resource access and educational discourses has reiterated a point that was made in our reading last week (Salyers, V et. al, 2014) as well, which led Ariel to eloquently point out the challenges this creates in terms of the support we as individual instructors need to provide to our students, who in in the absence of an institutional support structure might rely on us to get the technology training that enables their online learning.
I hope that this course is enough of a safe playground for you to determine what a purposeful integration of technology into your own teaching looks like and how you can build meaningful relationships with your students online.
There is no doubt that your decisions will be closely related to your personal preferences for learning. Your feedback to me has clearly pointed out the broad range of preferences within our own FLOf2019 cohort, where on its one end some people realize how little they care for the high level of interactivity we designed while on the other end some of you are fully enjoying it and are even asking for more.
By running into barriers like limited access to pay-walled resources or the encounter of unknown navigation paths yourselves, you’ve become even more aware of the fact that assessing and diagnosing barriers to student learning is only one part of the challenge posed by online instruction. In our conversations, you mentioned many of the other challenges that you experienced and which again serve as good examples for what you will most likely (have) encounter(ed) in your own online courses as well, namely the differences in expectations in students, the time constraints students are operating within as well as differing levels in motivation.
As those of you who started this week’s unit might have noticed, you are given options for the areas you wish to develop regarding your online work with diverse learners. I must admit, that learner diversity is one of the reasons why I have chosen an educational profession and I am already excited about the collection of strategies we will be compiling together this week. It might even include a few solutions to the challenges mentioned above.
Please reach out if you need any assistance. I will be available on all days this week including Saturday, but decided to indulge in a Sunday offline.
Hump day and hump week greetings to all,
Joerdis
References:
Salyers, V., Carter, L., Carter, A., Myers, S., & Barrett, P. (2014). The search for meaningful e-learning at Canadian universities: A multi-institutional research study. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 15(6). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v15i6.1713
Wagstaff, S. (2015). Teaching with Technology. CC-BY 4.0 Retrieved from https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/teachingwithtech/
