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.