Last words

The ONL-course is now finished. It has been an interesting journey characterised by a constant lack of time coupled with continuous stimulation from creative people, innovative techniques and imaginative ideas. My digital literacy has undoubtedly become better. I have learnt to use some modalities that earlier I had only heard about, and I have got glimpses into others that were completely unknown to me. I hope to have the possibility to explore them further when things slow down a bit. (Will it ever?) The main reason for me to join the course, apart from curiosity, was that I wanted to be better prepared for the online course that I will lead the coming spring semester. Am I more prepared? I think I am. In particular, I have seen a range of possibilities of which I was previously unaware. Probably, I need to restrain myself from being too creative though. The course is part of a programme and teaching methods that deviate too much from the other courses will presumably not be appreciated by the participants. I am also still unsure as to how some of the interesting things that I have learned can be used in practice. For instance, the tweet chat was really good fun. It would be interesting to try it in a course, but is it possible? To join it, the course participants need to have a twitter account, and can we force them to have that. After all, Twitter is a commercial company whose affairs a Swedish state university perhaps cannot promote just like that.

I will certainly use an inverted (flipped) classroom approach. The traditional lecture-based course structure will surely not work for an online, part-time course in which the course participants are working people who, doubtlessly, all struggle to solve the puzzle of work, study and life. Apparently, there are research indications that inverted classroom studies are effective in the amount of subject coverage as well as knowledge retention while at the same time received with satisfaction by the students (Mason et al., 2013). So, the lectures will be short, recorded and online. My plan is to complement them with a home literature exam fairly early on in the course just to coerce the students into reading the literature. My experience is that grading such an exam on the seven-level scale is neither meaningful nor feasible. Thus, the plan is to just give them pass or not pass on that part. The letter-grade they will instead get from the major part of the course which will be a project assignment that they will carry out preferably at their own workplaces. The aim is to induce reflexivity in which the participants learn from experience (Bruno and Dell’Aversana, 2018).

Browsing articles for the course I came across something that seems rather brilliant. I found this article (Haines et al., 2016) along with which the authors also provide online slides that teachers can use freely for their courses. This appears to me as a splendid way of increasing the usage and diffusion of one’s research findings. I must try this. Finally, I thank all the course leaders, facilitators and co-participants in the ONL-course for all their contributions to the stimulating experience that this has been.

References:

Bruno, A. & Dell’Aversana, G. (2018), "Reflective practicum in higher education: the influence of the learning environment on the quality of learning", Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 345-58.

Haines, E. L., Deaux, K. & Lofaro, N. (2016), "The times are a-changing… or are they not? A comparison of gender stereotypes, 1983-2014", Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 353-63.

Mason, G. S., Rutar Shuman, T. & Cook, K. E. (2013), "Comparing the effectiveness of an inverted classroom to a traditional classroom in an upper-division engineering course", IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 56 No. 4, pp. 430-35.

Dropouts and gamification

Here, far too late, my reflections for topic 4 come. In our group, we discussed much how to retain students on online courses. We all had the experience that the rate of dropouts is much higher in online courses than in campus courses. We discussed what the reasons were. The most common is probably that the students also work and they overestimate the time that they can devote to their studies (or underestimate the time that they need to devote). We found it consoling that although all the members in our group grapple with a constant lack of time, none of us has dropped out from the ONL-course. In order to further illustrate what is needed for keeping students aboard, we produced word clouds with the help of the mentimeter. The question was: How do we prevent dropouts from online or blended learning courses. We produced one cloud for our group and we asked the big community to contribute to another. Interestingly, they were partly different. The main difference was that support was our most emphasised word while communication was most emphasised in the big community. The reason for the difference may be that we had some technical problems for some of our group participants and we talked about the importance of supporting the students when they experience technical difficulties. And obviously, support requires communication – but takes it further. We also had a second question to the big group asking them to motivate their choice. But apparently, it did not work to have several questions on the mentimeter in this mode. So, we learned something also from this mistake :)

Now for something completely different: During the topic, I came to mull about whether we could learn from the gaming world. Gamification is making its entrance into more and more contexts – even in healthcare. Last year I spent some time on an online strategy game and my children play continuously. I have realised that the gaming companies are really skilled in keeping people stuck in their games. After all, it is a necessity for their survival. So, how could we learn from this? A study by van Roy and Zaman (2018) showed that gamification can indeed increase motivation over time. However, to be maximum effective it should be customised as individuals are motivated by different features. Koivisto and Hamari (2014) studied demographic differences in users of an exercise gamification service. In their study, they found that women report more social benefits from gamification and that the use decreased with age. More importantly, they found that the perceived enjoyment declined with use. This is, without doubt, the reason that online gaming firms constantly continue to develop new features in the games. Without them, gamers will become bored and leave. The same probably applies to education. Games can also be used for assessment of learning. Obviously, quizzes of various kinds can be fun and useful. But they are also a bit time-consuming to produce. Jo et al. (2018) instead suggest a generic tool based on a word game that measures the students' familiarity with the words used in the video lectures. Interesting, but I don’t know how to gain access to it. Nevin et al. (2014) tested a quiz-based game in graduate medical education. They found that it was well accepted, contributed to learning and that leaderboards were the greatest motivator to participate. Can we use leaderboards in our courses or will it be considered too elitist in a Swedish context? If we can, I am sure they have a profound motivating effect as they tickle our competitive spirit. In summary, it seems that gamification can be useful. The main trick is probably to activate our hormonal gratification centres. I will ponder further over this and see if somehow I can integrate it in my teaching.

References:

Jo, J., Yu, W., Koh, K. H. & Lim, H. (2018), "Development of a game-based learning system for online education environments based on video lecture: minimum learning judgment system", Journal of Educational Computing Research, Vol. 56 No. 6, pp. 802-25.

Koivisto, J. & Hamari, J. (2014), "Demographic differences in perceived benefits from gamification", Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 35 No. 179-88.

Nevin, C. R., Westfall, A. O., Rodriguez, J. M., Dempsey, D. M., Cherrington, A., Roy, B., Patel, M. & Willig, J. H. (2014), "Gamification as a tool for enhancing graduate medical education", Postgrad Med J, Vol. 90 No. 685-93.

Roy, v. & Zaman (2018), "Need-supporting gamification in education: An assessment of motivational effects over time", Computers & Education, Vol. 127 No. 283-97.

Participation and synergy in groups

Topic 3 has been the most valuable so far. In my subject, due to large groups and low funding per student, the students do all assignments in groups. Three very pertinent questions were raised in my group. The first concerned how to really engage all students in the groups. The problem with free-riders was discussed – a particular problem since we are supposed to assess and grade the students individually even if they do their work in groups. Interestingly, research apparently shows that assessment does not increase participation (Brindley et al. 2009).

The second question addressed the possibilities to create synergies in the group. Even if all group members participate actively, it is not certain that they work as an integrated group. They may be tempted to divide the work between them and choose one part of the assignment each. This may obviously be time-efficient for them but it also leads to their knowledge acquisition being fragmented and they miss the possibilities that teamwork has to learn from one another and arrive at a larger wholeness than just the sum of the individual inputs. In this context, I found an article by Sanchez-Segura et al. (2018) which contains valuable input in this regard. The authors propose a stepwise way of working. The first step is an organisational immersion phase in which the participants get to know each other and plan the continued work (probably a little as we did in the first topic of the ONL course). Identifying the group's target as well as their barriers and negative beliefs are important parts of this stage. The next step is the organisational expression in which the problem is structured. Then follows step 3 which is called root definition of relevant systems in which the group formally identifies their vision for understanding the situation of the problem. Next, in step 4 a system that supports the solution to the problem should be defined. In step 5, the outputs of steps 2-4 are checked for sufficiency. If this assessment is positive, the group moves on to step 6 in which they define the changes and desired states. Finally, in step 7 the changes and policies are implemented. One important success factor seems to be to really identify the barriers and negative beliefs that hinder the progress of the group. By addressing them, they can be turned into levers that instead propel the group forward. An example is that the barrier of lack of time can be addressed by clear scheduling, short and effective meetings and efficient communication. Although I am not sure that I understand all parts of their way of working, I think it can contribute to the course development and delivery. I will try to use it in my next course.

The third question that we came up with was how diversity in groups influence the engagement and synergies. We seemed to agree that although homogenous groups may be more time-efficient in the short run, diverse groups have much more creativity and innovativeness. I think diversity is important in order for us not to end up in knowledge bubbles in which only our own presuppositions are confirmed. Related to this subject, I watched a TED-talk by Rocío Lorenzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPtPG2lAmm4

I mention this in my previous blog post. She confirmed the value of diversity for creativity. But, amazingly only 30% of German top companies have even one woman in their board. They are really missing out on a great deal of knowledge and creativity.

Finally, we decided to use our own group as an example of how a good group could function. That was good fun :)