Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning
PLN means Personal/Professional/Passionate Learning Network (Oddone, 2019). For me Professional makes the most sense since this is a professional activity, though I can also see the merits of Personal since it's me as a person how is engaged in this.
Every discussion about pedagogy is really simultaneously a collaborative learning and part of a PLN. Most of my PLN is local and face to face. I discuss pedagogy with my colleagues in physics at the department, Nils, Magnus, Andreas and Corina. At the division level I talk to Marcus, Lars, Mikael and Petter. At the department level I discuss a lot with Niklas and as a PL (Pedagogical Leader at LTU), I discuss with Oskar, Janne, Malin, Karin, the other PL's: Olle, Inger, Susanne, Diana, Björn and Andreas. These networks are somewhere betwen communities and networks. We share common goals but we still work largely individually. Then there are also pedagogy conferences, both internal at LTU and external.
I am currently following two online courses and mentoring a third. In the both the "Sakkunnigkurs" and the ONL-course (Open Networked Learning), we have a group that works together. We have a nice collaboration and in the course we are a community with a common goal. However, at the end of the course the group will probably drift towards more of a network, where we can use each others competences when we have a need for them, or maybe have some discussions together. We will not share the course goals, but we are still teachers who share common goals of improving our students' learning.
One example of how I have used these courses for networking is that I found a teacher involved in physics and also equality of gender. This is something that I'm really interested in, so we had a great discussion on this together and he helped me out quite nicely.
A part from networks and communities for me as a teacher, it's really interested to discuss how we can engage students more in the digital classroom. I agree with Brindley et al (2009) that this is an important and difficult part of online education and no more so than now during the pandemic. When I think back on when I've had good collaborative learning, I can see a pattern of having a shared and complex goal that was not easily achieved alone. For example, I took an advanced course in Quantum Mechanics at École Polytechnique de Montréal, where we were divided on groups and each group that submitted a decent answer with get a grade B, while the best group would get an A. The whole class sat together on day before the deadline and worked and discussed through the problems together. I am sceptic towards the grading system, but we had a great collaborative learning process. Having a common goal is a necessary requirement for a community I think, as is also expressed by (Oddone, 2019). However, I think that the task also needs to be complex in order for the students to feel motivated to work as a group rather than as individuals. Another thing that I've learned during the ONL course is that if the teachers make time for collaborative learning in the schedule, it's much more likely to actually happen than if the teachers only preach it. Providing a mentor is also a great way for the teacher to emphasise the importance of the group work.
Capdeferro and Romero (2012) cites asymmetric collaboration as a problem that many students encounter. I agree that this is a common problem. An idea that I got is to group students by motivational level, depending on the grade the students want to achieve. A disadvantage with this method is that in reality, you can seldom chose your team mates, and learning to get along with different types of people is an important skill.
A lot of learning is social, but far from all of it. Practising and reflecting on your own is an important part of learning. But usually more complex and complicated tasks really benefit from discussing them. Furthermore, each student is different and they all have different approaches to learning.
Nowadays, a lot of group work is done through breakout rooms in Zoom. In my personal experience, this has worked really well in all kinds of constellations. However, I've heard colleagues who've had students simply leaving the Zoom-room during these group discussions despite being encouraged to participate by the teacher.
References
Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).
Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8mJX5n3IEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqSBTr9DPH8
I see that you have been working hard lately to produce your blog posts related to the ONL course!
ReplyDeleteJust like you I think that a complex task (that they feel is solvable) is motivating to make students work as a group (especially if the task is related to their future work environment). Moreover, I think that a complex task is more difficult to split among the group members, and they are, whether they like it or not, forced to work as a group (as opposed to in a group) in order to succeed. I realized this when looking at a task in one of our courses and saw that the questions were formulated in a way that more or less encouraged them to split the task among them. I believe that by making these questions a bit more complex, they will have to work together to be successful.
Group setup has been a question that I still am struggling with. In that past I (and my colleagues) let the students form their own groups. The main drawback was that they did what they were individually best at, i.e. one wrote the report, the other did the analyses, etc. This made them individually very good at what they were experts in, while they didn’t train their other skills. We then decided that we formed the groups to minimise this behavior. But we also change the group setup between each task/assignment so that they work with different people (those they like and don’t like, those that don’t speak swedish, etc.). Now that I have taken the ONL course I have realised that changing groups composition several times throughout a course forces them to more or less start over since they need to spend time to get to know their new group members. This cannot be good for a group's possibility to collaborate well. The outcome of our joint efforts within the PBL groups in the ONL course would definitely not have been as good as it was if we would have been forced to change groups for each topic. From now on I will think more carefully about how I set up groups in my courses.
Thanks for your reflections and I’m looking forward to what we can achieve within the PLN we both are a part of!
Dear Erik, Thank you for sharing your reflections on topic 3. There were many interesting points in your post, but please let me dwell on three of them. First of all, you concluded that if the teachers set aside time for collaborative learning (instead of just preaching it) it's more likely that it will happen. I think you are on to something there. I am thinking of a similar example, where one just invites the students to a discussion forum, hoping that lively discussions will occur. Of course, this sometimes happens, but in my experience it needs more careful consideration regarding the course design in order to make it happen. You need (in your words) also to preach it in the course design, integrating the requested discussions with the rest of the design of the course.
ReplyDeleteThe second theme I wanted to comment upon was your reflection on how to group the students. To carefully reflect on this is something good, so I really appreciated that you wrote about it here. I thought of the same thing here: good groups does not often come by itself but has to be accompanied by facilitation. Most courses at university level can't afford a system with facilitators, but I think there are other ways in how one can work with this. One example is to work with group agreements/contracts, another example is to distribute and rotate roles in the group (chairperson/moderator, secretary, someone that is responsible for including peers attending the group work remotely, perhaps an observer role (if that is of interest based on the intended learning outcomes). A third example is to follow up how the group work is going throughout the course.
The third thing I wanted to comment upon was your observation regarding that some students leave e-meetings during group discussions. What steps can you as a teacher take to avoid that situation? Any ideas?
I am looking forward to your next post!