Jane Womald from the University of Huddersfield, The Value of Soft Skills in Blended Learning.
In the transition of a course from face to face to blended learning the presenters wanted to make sure they didn’t lose the social aspects of f2f learning. The students were mature students, part time and working full time in education. Previously the course was a weekly evening course that established groups and critical friendships that developed through weekly contact. The course is typically over 3 years with 18 day schools. The primary principles of this project was to find away to create these create critical friendship groups and communities of inquiry (Vaughn and Garrison 2008) now that they didn’t meet as often. Basing their work on the assumption that mature learners have experience to share to help all of them wiht their self development and problem solving, they adopted the idea of interactive and cooperative peer learning (Bambino, 2002) and that social presence + social interaction = social learning (Tu, 2002).
In the first module each student was involved in a round of introductions (name, job, a positive aspect of their work) as soon as possible so each had a voice, each heard and shown to be willing to share. Then in groups of 3 students considered some principles and prepared to communicate this to others and others were prompted to ask questions about what was being said (eg what does it mean? How does that work? How will you use that in your work?). Between sessions students were encouraged to communicate (however they wished). Later on students had to write an assignment based on a critical incident at work (IE a problem) and people in their CFG gave them feedback on what they did. Plagiarism was not an issue as the essays were about personal incidents but people could learn from each other about different situations and double-loop learning occurred as the student got more advise and feedback about how to handle their problem.
The presenters identified that there is a “lack of evidence of building and supporting informal opportunities for similar spaces for dialogue when developing online learning courses. Much effort is given to the design and structure of courses and the methods of delivery, yet there is an assumption that the social aspects of learning will happen independently.”
Things to read
- Bambino, D. (2002) ‘Critical friends’ Educational Leadership. 59 (6) pp.25-27
- Garrison, D.R. and Vaughan, N. (2008) Blended learning in higher education: framework, principles and guidelines.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Reynolds, A. (2009) ‘Why every student needs critical friends’ Educational Leadership. Vol. 67 (3) November 2009. pp.54-57
- Rovai, A. & Jordan, H. (2004) ‘Blended Learning and sense of community: a comparative analysis with traditional and fully online graduate courses’. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 5 (2).
- Selwyn, N. (2009). ‘Faceworking: exploring student’s education-related use of ‘Facebook’. Learning Media and Technology.34 (2) June 2009. pp. 157-174.
- Tu, C.H. (2002) The measurement of social presence in an online learning environment. International Journal of Educational Communications. 16 (3) pp.34-55.
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