Design for Online and Blended Learning

I have just realized the importance of reflection! I want my students to reflect but when it comes to myself I tend to do other things than reflecting. Maybe, it’s because of a busy life and a heavy workload. I do the things I am supposed to do but seldom experience that I can afford to spend time on reflection. In my opinion, lack of time for reflection might result in ourselves having preconceived ideas that we fail to challenge. For instance, I have worked with PBL for several years and because of this I am very familiar with this way of teaching (or at least I think I am).

So, I would like to share two preconceived ideas of mine that I have challenged during this topic of the ONL course. First, PBL might sometimes get a bit fuzzy for students. And my preconceived idea about this has been that fuzziness is just a natural part of PBL. By searching the internet I have also found other people thinking about PBL in somewhat the same way. For instance I found a blog where one teacher described the views of one of his colleagues saying that PBL is inherently unstructured. I guess that our views partly has to do with our own experiences and partly with the notion described by Kek and Huijser (2015) that PBL comes in many different shapes and that this might result in the feeling that you can do whatever you like. It’s still PBL. Nevertheless, during this topic of the ONL course, I have challenged my views and realized the importance of structure. I have found the five stage model for online course design very appealing and this model includes a lot of structure. So, PBL does not need to be fuzzy. In fact, I know now that I could improve my teaching in my PBL environment by just adding more structure.

My second pre-conceived idea is about course introduction. For some reason I have had the idea that it must be beneficial for students with courses starting at full speed. In this way, the student’s realize the level of the course from the beginning and do not loose motivation because of inactivity. However, the five stage model has once again convinced me that my approach is not the best one. The five stage model instead focus on a smooth welcoming and making everyone familiar with the tools used in the course. And I know this is beneficial because this was just the way the ONL course started about two months ago. In this way, I got the chance to be well prepared before we actually started to study the contents of the course.

I would like to finish this blog post by concluding that this topic really has challenged my thoughts about course design. Hopefully, I will be able to implement my new thoughts in future courses.