De 2e verdieping, als je omhoog wilt moet je klimmen

Doel:

Ontdekken van nieuw kennis, verdiepen in nieuwe onderwerpen. Informatie doorgeven aan anderen.

Regels:

1. Kies een categorie en een onderwerp
   • onderwerp kan relevant zijn voor meerdere categorieën
   • kies kleine onderwerpen
2. Formuleer een vraag en een blog titel
3. Maak duidelijk wat de boodschap van de blog is
4. verzamel, lees, luister en kijk (internet, mensen, boeken, musea etc)
5. Maak versie 1 van de blog voor review
6. verwerk de feedback en vragen
7. Maak de final versie
8. Beoordeling van final versie
   1. compleetheid en inhoud
   2. duidelijkheid en to-the-point
   3. kwaliteit van geproduceerde text
   4. netheid en schoonheid
   5. nieuws waarde
   6. WoW factor (een of meerdere punten)

Combo’s & Bonuspunten:

• publiceer in 3 talen
• publiceer in 3 hoofd categories
• publiceer in 6 hoofd categories
• publiceer in 9 hoofd categories
• publiceer in alle hoofd categories
• publiceer in 3 sub categories binnen een hoofd categorie
• Gebruik zelf gemaakte foto’s
• Gebruik zelfgemaakte video’s
• Gebruik zelfgemaakte audio
• Gebruik zelfgemaakte figuren
• Gebruik een zelfgemaakte presentatie
• Deel je blog-post met anderen
• Verzamel 5 WoW (reviewers zijn erg onder de indruk van het geproduceerde werk)
• Verzamel 10 WoW
• Verzamel 15 WoW
• Publiceer een tweede blog als aanvulling op een gepubliceerde blog
• Maak 3 links tussen blogs
• Maak 6 links tussen blogs
• Maak 9 links tussen blogs

Categories:

1. Geschiedenis
   1. Pre-historie
   2. Klassieke tijd
   3. Middeleeuwen
   4. 1500-1700
   5. 1700-1800
   6. 1800-nu
   7. toekomst
2. Maatschappijleer & Politiek
   1. Wereld
   2. Zweden
   3. Nederland
3. Kunst & Cultuur
   1. Muziek genre
   2. Kunst geschiedenis (tijd of persoon)
   3. creativiteit
   4. Muziek stuk
   5. Schilderij of ander kunst voorwerp
   6. Architectuur
4. Literatuur, toneel & Film
   1. Nederlands
   2. Zweeds
   3. rest van wereld
   4. Boek
   5. Toneel
   6. Film
   7. Proza & Poëzie
5. Techniek and Technologie
   1. bouwwerken
   2. machines
   3. informatie technologie
6. Wiskunde & Rekenen
   1. rekenkundige problemen oplossen
   2. functies
   3. hoeken
7. Natuurkunde
   1. elektriciteit
   2. krachten
   3. licht & geluid
   4. astronomie
   5. energie
8. Scheikunde
   1. organisch
   2. elementen
   3. reacties
   4. mol berekeningen
9. Biologie & Medisch
   1. menselijk lichaam
   2. natuur
   3. DNA
   4. Ziekten en aandoeningen
10. Economie
    1. Gezin
    2. Land
    3. Wereld
11. Sport
    1. Beroemde of beruchte sporters
    2. Beschrijving van een sport
    3. Beschrijving van een sport evenement
12. Familie
    1. het persoonlijk leven van familielid
    2. wie waren mijn voorouders
    3. wie ben ik nu.

 

Open educational practices

What does ‘open‘ education mean?

The open educational practices aim for more openness in accessing courses and course material for all interested. In principle this is a very effective way to globally increase the level of education and spread knowledge. Personally I am in favor to educate the world and share knowledge with those that have no access to ‘closed’ education systems. In the classical system a student is registered at a university (this often requires intuition fees), in order to register he/she has to proof eligibility and show to have the level of education necessary to successfully complete the course or study. The teachers are employed by the universities to create education programs, based on self-create or purchased teaching material and methods. The universities facilitate learning and teaching and ensure quality and assessment of learning outcomes. Going from institutional education to open educational practices has many consequences for students, teachers and universities.

 

Who are the online students:

FDOL courses can be taken everywhere at anytime by everyone. But who are our FDOL/MOOC students and what are their motivations to participate in the courses? This blog by John Swope gives a summary of the demography of students that participated in 6 MOOCs organized by Edinburgh University. It is interesting to see that highest level of completed studies ranges from primary school (0.3%) to post-graduate university (40.2%) with over 70% of the participants already having a university degree. Also the motivation for students to participate in open online courses is different. The main motivation for university students is to improve career prospects, learn a profession and earn a larger salary (Survey, Cardiff University). Students that participate in FDOL courses want to learn something new or just experience online education. Only 33% follows the course to get a certificate. Expectation on student dedication and commitment should be based on student motivation. Between 7% (Chris Parr for Times Higher education) and 50% of enrolled students will complete the course (see this blog by Tucker Balch).

 

The teachers:

The motivation of teachers to get involved in FDOL varies. Some like to reach a larger audience, some are curious and like to explore alternative teaching methods and some just like to earn a little extra by offering online courses. One thing that became apparent to me (maybe I was naïve before) is that online teaching requires special skills and approaches and it is difficult to convert existing teaching material to tailor made digital content utilizing all benefits of FDOL. As a teacher the 50-93% drop-out is not really motivating in combination with the time and energy necessary to revise and reinvent effective teaching effect teaching experience. A blog post by Ronnie Burt titled “Why today is my last day teaching online…” discuss issues like student motivation and how rewarding online teaching is experienced.

 

The role of the universities:

The role of universities in the ‘closed’ education system is well defined. Universities are financially supported to educate and created an environment to enable teaching and learning. Recently many universities have implemented digital tools in their learning environment. Open educational practice is not the primary focus of universities and support for setting up FDOL courses is limited and mainly focused on exploring this new way of teaching. Furthermore, the established online education portals, like PingPong at the Karolinska Institute, are only for internal use and cannot be used in an open education framework. Alternative is to create (yet another portal) or explore some of the open education resources (EOR’s).

My impression is that governments stimulate FDOL and see it as the future of education. The universities follow policies and utilize the additional government funding to explore online education. Courses offered today are used to advertise the university and do not aim to replace traditional university education. I am curious how universities will react when online teaching further matures and becomes more competitive to courses and studies offered by universities.

 

Pioneering open education practice:

Open education and online learning are relatively new concepts of teaching and learning and teachers, universities and students will need some time to adapt to FDOL. Therefor I think it is important for my next step in becoming Flexible Distance Online Teacher (FDOT) I have the think big (utilize possibilities to the max) but start small (produce teaching material in small steps). 

 

How to support learners

Role of the course designer

The course designer not only determines the topic and learning outcomes but also has to create a suitable learning environment. In the classical teaching this means select and distribute textbooks, lecture halls, blackboards and other presentation tools. If he/she uses PBL and group assignments also dedicated space for student interactions should be made available. FDOL environment has its own needs and requirements and creating an appropriate learning environment both for asynchronous (passive) and synchronous (participatory) learning is essential. The digital tools used should be easy to work with without extra and unnecessary features. The most challenge aspect of FDOL is creating a learning community that after a short forming phase starts to interact and become productive.

 

Role of the facilitator (guide at the side)

When the digital classroom is created the teacher becomes a facilitator guiding the students learning process. Since there is no face-to-face interaction the teacher needs to make sure he/she is available for questions and follows learning progress and provides feedback. According to colleagues on the web, students need to be made aware of the teacher’s presence especially in the beginning of the course. It is also important that teachers build in possibilities to monitor student activities. This could be by using blogs and other communication tools or by more advanced learning environments that provide the teacher with all kinds of participation statistics that help facilitating. Many university learning environments like PINGPONG (Karolinska Institute) have basic options to monitor individual learning activities and progress and David Black-Schaffer has explored blended teaching and using monitor tools to improve his teaching. Most of the tools are not available outside the university network and open source public available tools are needed for an open access FDOL environment.

 

Student engagement

What you would like to achieve, as a teacher/facilitator is that students get engaged and start using the digital tools. It is important that they see the benefits of using the tools and not just complete the compulsory tasks. Maria Hedberg pointed out Peerwise in her blog. I think this is a very nice tool to get students engaged and to create a community that learns by generating questions and answers.

 

 

The worldwide classroom

Collaborative learning and communities

 

Why collaborative learning?

Participatory learning involving group discussions, peer teaching and practice has superior retention rates over passive teaching methods including lectures and reading. Therefore problem/case based learning has become an important and successful method in modern teaching.

 

How to stimulate collaborative learning?

Group heterogeneity maximizes student’s exposure to, and interaction with peers having diverse experiential backgrounds and perspectives (Cuseo, 1996).  But also factors like group size influence group progress and satisfaction. Large groups have difficulty scheduling meetings and allow students to ‘hide’ and not participate fully. However the group needs sufficient diversity of opinions and backgrounds to be most effective (for overview WCER web page).

 

Challenges in collaborative learning within an FDOL environment.

Many of the interactive learning formats require face-to-face settings enabling immediate feedback on the student’s contribution to the group.  The face-to-face makes interacting easier (some might disagree and prefer more anonymous interactions), but the most important part of face-to-face learning is synchronicity. With recent developments in digital tools this could be achieved using video conferencing or chatting. It becomes more of a challenge when flexibility is added to the equation. Now people will have the possibility to learn asynchronous (at lea. 

 

How do I experience collaborative learning within the FDOL environment?

There are two types of flexibility, individual flexibility and group flexibility. Within FDOL there are little limitations for group flexibility. However as an individual I quickly realized that within the group we have to organize and structure our synchronous learning activities. Another aspect of FDOL that I found challenging is the anonymity. I noticed that now that I start to get acquainted with the other group members  (all nice people) I have less problems sharing my thoughts and giving feedback.

 

How to optimize collaborative learning in a FDOL environment?

The worldwide classroom is a strange place spanning different time zones with a (in many cases) heterogeneous student population and a high degree of anonymity between students and teachers. Do the same rules regarding heterogeneity and group size when teaching online? The first step could to take away part of the anonymity that is a big barrier that inhibits interaction and feedback. Easiest would be to organize a face-to-face meeting with all participants but digital variants  (eFika) using video would have a similar effect. Since it is essential that the students are interacting there need to be a time window for the students to interact. Selecting groups based on time zone and rhythm (working hours – study time) could also help creating more effective collaborative learning communities. However, this should not influence the heterogeneity of the group regarding experience and perspectives.

 

References:

 Cuseo, J. B. (1996). Cooperative Learning: A Pedagogy for Addressing Contemporary Challenges and Critical Issues in Higher Education. Stillwater, OK.: New Forums Press and the Professional and Organizational Network in Higher Education. (only page 1-20)

 Collaborative Learning – Small group Learning Page – http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/archive/cl1/cl/default.asp

Flexible learning in the digital age

What does flexibility mean?

As indicated by Ryan & Tilbury, flexibility can be subdivided in 3 basic territories 1) Pace (full/part-time commitment and prior learning experiences), 2) Place (location of teacher and student during learning), 3) Mode (technologies and methods).

 

What does flexibility add to distance and online learning?

Enabling distance learning already creates a level of flexibility (Place). From a teachers perspective it would require relatively little investment to convert his/her lectures to digital versions and many face-to-face learning paradigms can be broadcasted via communication tools that we use in our everyday life.  By recording sessions it is easy to create flexibility in when students learn (Pace). However the challenge is to not only convert “classical” teaching material and approaches to digital versions, but to utilize the various possibilities and advantages of elearning and create more flexibility in Pace and Mode.

 

Who are the eStudents?

One reason for creating online course material is to enable blended learning or flipping the classroom for our University courses and full time university students.  However increased flexibility makes our teaching also interesting for students that are not able to study full time (parenting, working) or lifelong learners who either study out of interest or to further develop their professional skills (Mahieu & Wolming).

 

Learner empowerment.

One interesting concept is learner empowerment, co-creating content and teaching material together with students shifting from a teacher controlled to more student managed teaching using participatory and active pedagogies (Ryan & Tilbury). I use this type of teaching with project-students that spend a few weeks in my laboratory. I noticed that this approach motivates and increases engagement of students.  Using this approach in more basic theoretic settings is a bit more challenging  (to me) and require a teacher to be guide the learning process, creating the template with enough flexibility but also clear directions to achieve the learning outcomes.  During the course the teacher oversees and guides while students learn and interact.

 

How do I experience flexible learning in FDOL?

Since this is the first time I experience FDOL it took me some time to get familiar with. Like I was thought at primary school how to behave and what to do in a classroom I feel I am undergoing the same process of familiarizing in the digital classroom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Alex Ryan and Daniella Tilbury.  Flexible pedagogies: new pedagogical ideas

Ron Mahieu  & Simon Wolming. Motives for Lifelong Learners to Choose Web-based Courses

 

 

First stop – Digital Literacy

The World Wide Web is just another place where teachers and students meet and interact using the same basic learning methods and paradigms. This teaching environment has both advantages and disadvantages over the ‘classical’ classroom. Blended learning implements the best of both worlds aiming to create an optimal set of passive and participatory teaching tools. In an era that mobile phones are as powerful as a small computer with full multimedia functionality and fast Internet connections everywhere there are no technical limitations for integrating digital teaching tools in everyday teaching. Flexible distance and online learning has its own challenges. Due to geographical distance between students and teachers, face to face (live) interactions are not possible and teaching is mediated via digital tools only.

Both blended and FDOL require some degree of digital literacy of both teachers and students, which I think is sometimes more a challenge for teachers than (younger) students. Based on experience, course material and information/thoughts shared by fellow FDOL141 participants it is clear to me that it is important define learning outcomes and decide on learning methods (passive or participatory) before searching for digital tools to facilitate online teaching. I also noticed that it is a jungle out there with many digital tools either developed for social media or specifically for teaching and no single tool or digital teaching platform that includes all relevant teaching methods exists. One of my objectives for the coming weeks is to explore various tools but also platforms (e.g. google+) that could act as a backbone connecting various teaching content and formats. Who owns the content when I use public available tools, (as also pointed out by Elsa in a comment on my previous post) and can I use university platforms if I would like to teach outside my university.

The journey continues….

An eLearning experience: part 1 Departure

In this first post I summarize the current state of my knowledge and ideas on eLearning and how to implement this into my teaching. I hope and expect that during the FDOL141 course I will gain new insights in many aspects related to eLearning and will use this first post for self-reflection during the course. Since I am not an expert in pedagogy I hope to get feedback from you (FDOL141 community).

Why am I interested in flexible distance and online learning?

With recent developments in IT tools and gadgets, and the way internet has become part of our lives, it is a good time to explore possibilities to utilize this as a education platform.  What especially appeals to me are:

1. Outreach: being able to interact and educate people everywhere.
2. Record, reuse and reach the millions: What movies are to plays, could eTeaching be to classroom teaching. The fact that in an eLearning environment the teacher does not need to repeat his/her performance, allows investing time and energy into improving and optimizing lessons and content.
3. Flexibility: By creating an online education platform students can study when they want and as fast as they want.
4. My personal career: Climbing the academic ladder I need to show the world I am a competent teacher. Since research is my main activity I need to find ways to further develop my teaching skills.

How will I implement this into my current and future teaching?

I love IT developments and tempted to implement new gadgets and developments in my life without considering what value it adds (just because it is possible).  My current plans for implementing eLearning are:

1. Flipping the classroom: eLearning could replace large parts of my current teaching (lectures) freeing up space for more interactive face-face teaching.
2. Educate the world at all levels: One of my current projects is to generate a public available online protein atlas of the mouse brain. This is mainly image data (googlemaps type of data). The platform created could also be used to teach all that are interested about the organization of the brain and functions of proteins.

What do I feel I would need to know/learn in order to effectively implement FDOL in my teaching?

There are a few aspects of FDOL that I need to learn about in order to become a more effective eTeacher. These questions/concerns are:

1. To what extend can I replace face-face teaching, how can I interact with my students without becoming a full-time blogger/twitterer.
2. What effect does flexibility have on my teaching; students will not work synchronically, which affects group assignments.
3. How will the students find me or how do I find potential students? I have the feeling eLearning is booming, and I have the feeling it is difficult for any potential student to find interesting high quality courses.
4. What tools should I use? I aim for an open access platform not limited to university networks. Should I use platforms like google+ (how open are these and what will happen with these platforms in the future)