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Improving practice

Online and blended learning can obviously take many different forms, and my own experience is rather rudimentary. It totals two courses, one pure online course and the other a blended course combining online with offline teaching. The online aspects of these courses were, for purely non-academic reasons, kept extremely simple. For instance, the pure online course offered participants no direct student-teacher interaction of any kind and student collaboration was encouraged but largely left to the students. The blended course had plenty of face-to-face interaction during classroom sessions, but little in the way of online activities of a similar kind. There is in other words substantial room for improvement. Taking the cue from Solomon’s Five-stage model (Solomon 2013), both courses could start with a mandatory introduction to the online environment and to online teaching. This would give students an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the technological aspects of online lea...
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The unfulfilled promise: formative assessment for collaborative learning online

In their article Brindley, Walti and Blaschke (2009) argue that although assessment has been said to be an important factor contributing to collaborative online learning their analysis did not show indicate that assessment made a difference with regard to participation levels. Despite this rather discouraging result, they nevertheless include assessment as one of ten suggested strategies to enhance collaborative learning. Specifically, they write  “Monitoring and feedback The study group conferences and chats are monitored closely by instructors who provide respectful and timely feedback on process and direction when necessary to prevent groups from getting stalled or going off course. Instructors also provide feedback on draft versions of the case studies, and they provide time for revisions before presentation of the final project.” ( p. 6) However, the lack of impact of assessment techniques may be more general than they realize. The review by Black and Wiliam (1998a)...
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Should we head for the open spaces? On the pros and cons of openness

When it comes to teaching, the question of openness versus “closedness” may seem like a moot point. Being a teacher per definition involves a certain degree of openness as one is sharing one’s identity, personality, knowledge and experience with other people. The question is thus not “if”, but rather “how” and “how much”? With regard to “how much”, Ehlers (2011) specified three levels of openness – low, medium, and high.  Low levels was present if “objectives as well as methods of learning and/or teaching are rooted in “closed” one way, transmissive and reproductive approaches to teaching and learning. In these contexts, the underlying belief is that teachers know what learners have to learn and mainly focus on knowledge-transfer.” In contrast, medium levels where present if “objectives are still predetermined and given, but methods of teaching and learning are represented as open pedagogical models. They encourage dialogue oriented forms of learning or problem based learn...
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