Topic 5 ONL201 Journey Reflection

If my Calendar serves my memory correct it has been 12 weeks since I enrolled for ONL201 and every week has its own challenges and accomplishments. Now we have reached the end of our ONL201 journey and it has been nothing short of greatness and wealth of knowledge and experience. I would not substitute this experience for anything in the world as it has been a revelation of the current unprecedented times we are facing globally (COVID19).

Never did I imagine myself taking part in an Online Collaborative learning course as this tapped on my biggest fear of using and exploring digital collaborative tools and technology, let alone being put in a group with people from different countries and the only form communication was through an online collaborative platform or social platform. Now this was enough reason to scare me away and probably deregister from the course, but I decided to challenge myself and stop boxing myself from old traditional ways of learning. What I have taken away from this course is how valuable and important communication and trust is amongst any group of learners. This has given me the opportunity to be more open about my opinions and not shy away thinking that my idea is a stupid idea. This course has shown me the power of being able to share my ideas and opinions as this has helped with structure and giving multiple ways of solving a problem that you had no answers to.

Without any doubt my views on teaching practices have changed for the better and I intend to put all this knowledge in practice going forth and also try to convince my colleagues to explore more of the digital tools that I have been exposed to such as Prezi, Coggle, padlet just to name a few. I definitely think online collaborative tools are the new classrooms and therefore should embrace it more as many institutions are shifting to Blended Learning.

With all of the above mentioned I would like to say to the upcoming ONLers that, they need to be ready to soak up all the information and knowledge they about to bump into as it is for their benefit. In the beginning it may seem this is all too much but the key is to keep going and I promise it gets easier. A tip: Give yourself enough time for the readings and do not feel the pressure of trying to read everything all at once as this can be frustrating. There is no doubt that time will be of the essence and you will need to use it wisely as you try to balance your day to day work hours with the ONL course.   

Are you ready?

Reflect on how you can provide support, facilitation and scaffolding for students in online and blended learning environments.

During the past two weeks of topic 4 (Design for online and blended learning) it is evident that Online learning is something that each and every institution will have to adapt soon or later. For Teachers/Lecturers this can be a demanding task to implement in their teaching and learning pedagogy.

I think my PBL Group and I finally got a broader better understanding of all the nitty gritty that needs to go into designing an online program or blended learning. According to Cleveland-Innes and Wilton (2018) Blended learning refers to “the use of traditional classroom teaching methods together with the use of online learning for the same students studying the same content in the same course.” I believe the main purpose of blended learning is to enable effective and memorable learning for learners and in doing so this will help teachers engage more with students and encourage collaboration.

In my line of work/career I run workshops on academic writing, referencing and post grad support as the need arises or per request. All these workshops used to run face to face before the Lockdown. This pushed/tapped into my greatest fear of going online and using/exploring collaborative tools to run my workshops. For this to commence I needed to outline a few steps for my online workshops to be successful. So I decided to go with Gilly Salmon five stage model which “provides a framework or scaffold for a structured and paced program of e-tivities” (Salmon, 2013).

These stages are namely: access and Motivation, online socialization, information exchange, knowledge construction and development. In a nutshell at a teacher/lecturer you need to be sensitized to these stages as it assists with scaffolding and structuring your blended learning. An in-depth explanation of how the model further illustrates these 5 stages please do click on the this link: https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html by (Gilly Salmon, 2013).

The reason why I chose to go with this model is because it is a simplified guideline on how to incorporate online learning in your course and also has illustrative videos to assist teachers. We all know it can be frustrating when you trying to venture into blended learning especially if this would be your first time, it is so easy to find yourself in the deep end. It takes time and patience and lastly Gilly Salmon 5 stage model to master online and blended learning.

Topic 3: When real life collaborative learning took place.

In the past 2 weeks of trying to unpack the topic of Online Collaborative learning in our communities, it became evident that there is a distinct difference between cooperative and collaborative learning. According to Laal et al (2012) some of the difference between cooperative and collaborative learning is that the teacher involvement and guiding is larger in cooperative whereas the students take a more active part in collaborative learning.

Collaborative learning requires more student opinion and perspective and use of online collaborative tools than of a teacher/lecturer face to face teaching. Many of our communities have become comfortable with old traditional teaching methods, that they steer away from changing that spectrum and explore with new and improved teaching and learning Pedagogy. However, technology, innovation and job requirements have been demanding to change our old ways and jump into the latest Global trends. For many academic institutions blended learning is becoming a staple to improve teaching strategies.

For the purpose of this reflection, I will be reflecting on my real life collaborative experiences during the COVID 19 Lockdown. My experience with Online Collaborative learning has rather been a little challenging with regards to exploring digital tools, communication and building trust within the group. Indeed, these are trying times for many countries as we all had to adjust to the safety demands of the Corona outbreak. At some point it became overwhelming for me as I had to adjust to working from home and be able to strike a balance between various groups of students to whom I run workshops for and still be able to participate in the ONL course. Not only did i have to maintain a balance but also explore with various digital tools to ensure effective and efficient learning across all groups. Another challenge that I came across was building trust within the groups because it is no secret that this Online collaborative learning is new to most of us and therefore many of the students have doubt and no trust in the process, but it became my priority that I instill trust before we continue with any workshops/learning as this would help decrease unnecessary absenteeism and miscommunication which would lead to failure to meet the desired goals. 

With all that is said above, Online Collaboration is an effect way to encourage participation and collaboration among learners and achieve the desired goals.

Open learning-Sharing and Openness.

“Where do I even start?” This has become a very common question from the time Topic 2 was launched, to our first PBL group meeting for Topic 2, as i try to settle and prepare to work from home as my country (South Africa) went into 21 days of Lock down and yet again as i write my reflection the same question pops up. I asked myself where do I start?, how will I do his? can i do this?

Confusion confusion and yet more questions arise, sounds familiar to our scenario given for topic 2 right?

As my group and I sat to discuss this topic each of us had our own definition of what open learning is and what constituted as Open Learning. It was very interesting to discover some of the opportunities and barriers that exist with trying to go open, the impact it has to the receivers of information and the measures and efforts put in by teachers/Authors to have their work “freely” accessible for everyone on the internet.

As much as this topic has given us a broad overview, it has facilitated in giving me a better understanding of Open Learning and also encouraged a lot of unanswered questions/Gaps that still need answers. Through out the 2 weeks we have spent on this topic we still kept going back and forth on what to focus on when yet another question creeped up”is Open learning really Free”. Mmmmh what i topic to have, given the time and the global issues faced by many countries (COVID19) and many of us being pushed and encouraged to work on the online space. This has been a turning point for many of us as our online capabilities are being tested. However this has fostered my group into deciding to focus on”Why go Open” as our focus area for our presentation.

For the purpose of our presentation we decided to look at 5 different perspectives of why and why not to go open. These perspectives are: Teacher, Learner, Community, Institution and National perspective.

One last thing i would like to highlight in my reflection is the importance of having a collaborative group and ensuring that there is at at least 80% participation from each individual. This helps fill the gap when one or two members of the group fall short in a certain aspect and also helps the group to keep going even when feeling challenged and discouraged at times. Team work is very vital for this course.

TOPIC 1: Online Participation and Digital Literacy

The past 3 weeks have went by so fast, and in a blink of an eye we are done with topic 1, wow! It has been a roller coaster with the amount of information we needed to grasp with regards to getting started, preparing for our tasks and being able to attend PBL group meetings.

This topic has been an eye opener for me because it turned out i was not digital savvy as i thought 🙂 but, the learning experience gained from this topic helped me explore other digital platforms that i have never been exposed to. We might not be aware of how important digital literacy is in our personal and professional lives and to actively participate in such platforms. What also interested me in this topic was how much we all (PBL group) related to the person in the scenario given and that made it very much easy to understand and be able to complete our task.

This topic encourages us to blend our teaching strategies with digital literacy and to encourage online participation from both teachers and students. This also helps diversify learning and make it a lot interesting, plus digital platforms serve as a lifeline during a pandemic like we facing now (The Corona Virus).

According to White, D ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be) most people tend to be visitors when it comes to using digital platforms for their professional lives and stay as visitors rather than transcend to residents. There could be multiple reasons as why but, one could be scared to use the different tools and would rather stay as visitors.

This topic has encouraged me to explore more in the digital space and to not fear anything as long as i am willing to learn, in-fact embrace making mistakes because that is how we learn.

Lastly as much as this topic is about online participation but it also kept reminding us as a group how important for each of us contribute in completing this task and that we should all collaborate and participate as much as we can.