Reflections on Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning
Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash
Online and Blended learning...Hybrid learning...Flipped learning, Flipped classrooms !!!! These were some of the new terms that I was exposed to at the beginning of April 2020, perhaps the time when we the world started living in the times of the New Normal.
Interesting and challenging as it has been for the past 9 months now, metaphorically speaking, we see the birth of a different take at many things in life including teaching. All actors in this - students and teachers learned to handle the new tools, new technologies, and adjusted to new demands. But somethings remained common such as the educators' challenge regarding engaging students in classrooms and the students' challenge adjusting to new styles of pedagogy.
For this topic, the PBL 13 group took the support of Beck's model of online experience based on 3 components - the social presence, teaching presence, and the cognitive presence. The social presence looks at the community space of an educational experience. The teaching presence discusses the design and direction of pedagogy in the teaching space. The cognitive presence discusses the learning engagement of students with the educator's teaching content. Thus the holistic teaching experience is composed of Discourse, Climate, and Content as facilitators to the experience of online blended learning.
Among the various elements and sub-elements that contribute to the above, I was interested mainly in social presence. It was interesting for me to discuss how elements like trust, social relationships, identity, and communication influence the social milieu of online learning. Moreover, these are complex variables of abstract nature and highly dependent on the actors who make up the social milieu. These components are not bound by any physical spaces or linked to rules of mathematics, in other words, they function freely and can manifest in totally different ways in different scenarios. How can the teacher control the complexities arising due to the unpredictable nature of such abstract items? How can a formula be created to ensure that the social presence of all actors is maintained and optimum performances are achieved? Can there even be a formula?
Topic 4 did have some answers - one, there can be no formula, and two, we can create some practical support structures and facilitators to ensure that online teaching and blended learning can function well. Through the use of properly devised teaching plans, a process of collaborative learning can be instigated in an online class. A community of inquiry may be generated by devising well-designed models for knowledge disbursement, assessment, feedback, and reflection. A transition from exploration to the conception of ideas and solutions can be helpful to maintain the balance between the different stakeholders in a learning framework.
....and as always we learnt a new tool - The Canva was used to make PBL 13's presentation for topic 4.
It has indeed been an incredible year. All these elements were present in the traditional classroom but have become more apparent in the online environment. Social and emotional presence were not so important in the traditional lecture-based classroom where the students were largely consumers but now when teamwork and collaboration are such essential work skills we are revising our pedagogies.
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