So time fore som reflection on the course, my PBL-group and my own work. If I start with the course it selves, I can come up with mostly positive comments, so let’s start there. The first topic was around openness and sharing, two things that have had great impact of the growth of Internet, and I hope that attitude will bring evolvement even to education and how we treat learning and learners in the educational world. On the other hand I sense that a lot of the trends right now is moving toward more closed platforms and protective behaviour in how companies and institutions tends to treat data and information. Other really interesting topics in the course has been around on-line learning in combination with collaborative learning. The social aspect is one of the thing that my head is spinning around for the moment, when planning for new courses and programs. I am sure that there are a need for teachers to focus on acting like a learning coach more than as a transmitter of information. The only things that I think is not that good in this course is that some of the tools like Twitter or bloggs feels a bit old school, but on the other hand I don’t have any concrete suggestions what to use instead.

If I try to reflect on my on role in the course and in our PBL group I feel a bit unsure. The first thing that crosses my mind is that I have experienced what it is to be a student in a type of course that I like to design for the new engineering program at our university. I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking with colleagues on how to create a good social context when a lot of education going on outside a traditional classroom. I cant say that I have all answers yet, but I think that I have made new insights and experiences that’s going to be valuable in future course design. Some of the links and recommended reading that where presented to us in the different topics going to be a good starting list of papers, reading and research in an area that I find very important for me as a teacher in the university environment.

As a group we initially had some problems to get together, this is probably natural but something to think about when I design for the same type of on-line learning where students are about to work in groups or peer with each others. I think that tight scheduling and some early group submission would speed up the process of seting the terms of how to work as a group. The group evolved, so after the first two weeks we actually got together very well as a team. The Zoom meetings has become more and more informal and I think that most of us are more or less relaxed when we meet on-line. Another thing that I experienced as stimulating is that we have had group members from different countrys and separat parts of the world. We also had diversity in working background. All this together contributed to interesting discussions and creative solutions on our submission on the different topics.

During this topic I focused on how to try to ensure good communication in courses. Good and honest communication among students and between teachers and students are keys for a successful course.

Successful interpersonal communication enhances learning. Building trust is essential to deal with emotional issues that arise in courses. It is essential for the teacher to try to create an environment that allowes students to communicate among their peers and with the teachers. Studies found that students who provide and receive feedback gain most from collaborative learning, so open communication is key.

”Students’ perceptions of the way the instructor has provided structure and guidance for the online collaborative activity are related to their perceptions of peer interactions and to the perceived learning. In other words, the better the students understood the instructions and assessment of collaborative activities, the more they perceived they were connected with their classmates and the more they learned from these activities.” (Faja, 2013).

So it is important that the teacher try to ensure good communication among students and between the student group and the teaching staff. While doing this it is allso a good idea to try to ”sell” what is about to be learnt and how the students learn. This is to create an possitive atmophere around what the students are about to experience.

Some conclusions drawn while working on topic 3 regarding how to organize active courses. There are differencies between in campus and distance courses, but on the otherhand I think that both types of cources need to be designed in the same way to be relevant in the future.

During our work in the group we agreed on a few viewpoint and aspects woth taking into consideration when running and designing courses.

1. Forming

According to University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) there are some advantages and disadvantages in the way of dividing students into learning groups. There are some major ways of doing this and each of them have different pros and cons.
Random appointment
Easy and quick, but the need of attention if groups have inactive members.
Self-selection
Easy to administre, but teacher have to be aware that some students might not know who to work with and students might have hard to find groups.
Selective appointment
Some say that it can be disadvantageous for less performing students and a risk is the Pygmalion effect (teacher asume all among high performers do their job and miss out if one of them not do what they suppose to do).
Task appointment
Many find this motivating, but unbalanced topic selection with many in some groups and few in others is a risk and there can be a selection bias. Friends tend to sign up for the same topic in the hope of working together.

2. Communicating

Encourage teams to collaborate with online applications outside of the LMS environment. The tools in most LMS platforms are not conducive to effective group work, use Web 2.0 tools outside the platform
 such as chat tools, video conferencing tools, blogs etc. to get the students to interact socially with each others.

Siemens (2002) notes that learner-learner interactions in an e-learning course can be viewed as a four stage continuum:

Communication – People ‘talking,’ discussing
Collaboration – People sharing ideas and working together (occasionally sharing resources) in a loose environment
Cooperation – People doing things together, but each with his or her own purpose
Community – People striving for a common purpose

3. Assessment

In most courses (online and in-campus), most instructors provide a final quiz at the end of their course and a passing score accompanied by a certificate or a grade. This might be a good start but is it enough? Probably not. Assessment works best when it is ongoing, not episodic. This way, you can also show students their progress in the course and what they achieved in each step of the way. Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff (1996, p. 167, ISBN-13: 978-0262082365) for example say that: “In keeping with a learner-centered approach, assessment should be part of the learning-teaching process, embedded in-class activities and in the interactions between learners and between learners and teachers.”

4. Peering

Findings showed that students and professors use both formal and informal environments often, to optimize learning but online course design is usually not designed to consider informal experiences of the students. In the new networked environments, it may be impractical to define what formal or informal learning is but instructors are now more than ever trying to understand the affordances of each to create effective learning designs (Betül C. Czerkawski, 2016).

5. Contributing

Details of the requirements to participate in a course should be described in the course syllabus. The purpose of collaboration and expectations of the learners should be made very clear to all participants and the teacher have to encourage participation, discussions and collaboration and that this is an important part of the contributions in the course. The group task, deadlines and deliverables should be described in detail, giving students the best opportunity to focus on collaborating to share ideas and the workload rather than leaving them to spend a great deal of time trying to understand expectations from the teacher/course.

What are the opportunities and dangers of “going open”?

Opportunities and dangers of “going open”

Although the idea of opness is thriving at the moment, it is important also to look at some challenges that might have effect on the development of open resources. According to (Dr. Jan Hylén, ”Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges”) the challenges can be divided into three main areas.

Lack of awareness of copyright issues

Today it is easy to have access to publishing and production tools, and by licensing access to a digital product rather than a physical object such as a book or print, researchers as well as teachers now have to deal with licensing as never before. Although many academics are willing to share their work, they are often hesitant as how to do this without losing all their rights. Several open content licenses have been developed, like the Creative Commons and the GNU Free Documentation Licence, to accommodate this problem.

Quality assurance

Teachers, students and self-learners looking for resources should not have difficulties finding resources, but still might have problems of judging their quality and relevance.

Some institution-based providers use the reputation of the institution to persuade the user that the materials on the website are of good quality. If not, the prestige of the institution is at risk. Most probably they use internal quality checks before the release of the courses, but these processes are not open in the sense that the user of the resource can follow them.

Another approach is to have the resources reviewed by peers. The peer review process is one of the most used quality assurance processes in academia.

A third quality management approach is not to have a centrally designed process, but rather let individual users decide on whatever ground they like whether a learning resource is of high quality, useful, or good in any other respect. This can be done by letting users rate or comment on the resource or describe how they have used it, or by showing the number of downloads for each resource on the website. This is a kind of low level or bottom-up approach often used on Internet based marketplaces, music sites, etc.

Sustainability of OER initiatives

The fact that so many initiatives for OER, MOOCs and other open initiatives have started has created competition for funding. Although some projects have a strong institutional backing it is most probably start up funding that will cease after a few years. Therefore it is important to seriously consider how the initiatives can be sustained in the long run.

During Topic 1 we worked on Digital Literacy. Digital literacy refers to an individual’s ability to find, evaluate, and create information on various digital platforms.

One of the first steps of reaching global digital literacy is to work on the level of access to technology. Inequality network speed, economy, technical knowledge and democratic rights around the globe it is actually an obstacle toward digital development and global digital citizenship. It is obvious that lack in freedom of speech and censorship will hinder digital literacy, but even in developed democracies there are issues with different skills between generations, people with economically differences and levels of education.This is called the digital divide, and there are various levels of this divide.  There is even a gender divide within the sphere of technology and digital literacy.

Big decisions need to be made considering Net neutrality, development 5^thgeneration of mobile network access and privacy around the globe if we want a growth in digital literacy.

Schools, universities and actors in the educational market have made great progress in developing courses and curriculum in the strive to achieve digital literacy to meet with demands that goes hand in hand with the future development of the digital life. Despite some consensus about what the competencies are and how they can be acquired, results from international studies indicate that teaching strategies are often not well implemented in actual educational practice. The reasons for this include a lack of integration of the right competencies in curriculum and assessment, insufficient preparation of teachers and the absence of any systematic attention for strategies to adopt at scale innovative teaching and learning practices. We need to realize that there are areas that need to be looked at and that are lacking (J. Voogt, O. Erstad, C. Dede, P. Mishra, 2013)

Finally, I need to speak about the work process in PBL grup 13. And I really think that our initial problems of getting the group together, finding ways to work and meeting times are connected with digital collaboration issues. I am quite convinced that the future in educational design will include more of digital forms of work and education need to implement “distance” both in geographical distance and in timely distance. How to solve the participants social environment and to find a working social context are a key to success.

A few new things done!

Starting with Twitter, a bit boring but at least I have done it

Starting writing a Blogg, this i also new to me

Meeting with PBL group colleagues. Interesting to meet with them, I think this is going to be a fruitful collaboration