Open Minds, Open Resources

 

 

This week’s readings were all about comparisons.  First, Fisher et al. discussed how the pandemic seems like the first time that online learning was used for many, it really has been used for years in the wake of other areas of crisis (2020).  Hurricane Katrina, wildfires in California, and other localized disasters have created need to have an option to learn online for students. 

This poses an interesting situation, as the family becomes more of a role in education than ever before (Fisher et al., 2020).  Teachers need to keep the focus on information that students don’t already know, the topics that parents and guardians can’t teach on their own, and include social and emotional interventions (Fisher et al., 2020). 

It was also mentioned that there was opportunity to learn from the previous iterations of online learning, but that simply it didn’t happen – the goals were to get things back to normal and not to improve upon online or face to face learning.  It was merely to survive (Fisher et al., 2020). 

Next, I looked at the differences between Problem Based Learning and regular projects.  Where Problem Based Learning includes the learning as the project is completed, projects are simply a product of the knowledge learned.  This is an important distinction because there is evidence that shows that students that engage in Problem Based Learning improve their critical thinking, collaboration, self direction, and resolution skills in addition to gaining content knowledge (Bryans-Bongey & Graziano, 2016).

Some of the digital tools mentioned are blogs to evaluate writing, YouTube to evaluate speaking skills, and ideas for projects included building bridges to learn math and physics and solving environmental issues to learn science content.  By using real world problems, students are actively engaged and content is relevant and collaborative (Bryans-Bongey & Graziano, 2016).

Bryans-Bongey and Graziano looked at the differences between Open Educational Resources (OER) and Free Resources.  It’s an important distinction, especially for educators as not all Open Educational Resources are able to be downloaded and saved to local drives (2016).  This is an important distinction for instructors to understand as they need to respect the usage agreements and help students to do so as well, so that they can become responsible users of digital content. 

Examples of online resources include podcasts which assist auditory learners, open resource books which allow all people to have greater access, and open courses which can provide enrichment for advanced students and personalized learning (Bryans-Bongey & Graziano, 2016).  Regardless, instructors must vet these resources as quality varies and is not guaranteed.

Bryans-Bongey and Graziano also explored tools that can be used for different types of assessment including formative, summative, peer, and self (2016).  Some of these included discussion boards and social media like Twitter and Facebook, Edmodo which is similar to Facebook but geared toward classrooms, Present-me which allows students to record presentations with a split screen featuring a talking head to narrate, and Lightshot which allows editing and highlighting of screenshots for emphasis (Bryans-Bongey & Graziano, 2016). 

Finally, Khoo and Bonk had me wrestling with the ideas of interactivity and engagement (2022).  I had never really thought about the differences before, but it makes sense to differentiate from a instructional design perspective as the outcomes are very different.  

Interactivity focuses on learner-peer interactions.  These might include online role play, virtual collaboration, using google docs for collaboration, and even Zoom or Skpe to foster connection to others.  Engagement is focused on the connection of learners to the system.  This might look more like individualized learning focusing on interactive  maps, timelines, simulations, and also microblogging through Twitter and Facebook (Khoo & Bonk, 2022). 

Both of these promote active learning, but the focus is different based on the objective of the activity and some may be more appropriate than others for different lessons or even different learners.

One thing that came up in all of these articles was the use of collaborative tools to ensure that students were not isolated.  This is likely a result of concerns coming from the pandemic when online learning was forced, and now that it is optional but still preferred by many for a variety of reasons, there is room to improve it and make it engaging, interactive, open, and project based. 

There was one comment that I read that startled me this week, and that was in the Bryans-Bongey & Graziano chapter looking at OER and Free tools for education.  The comment was that using OER didn’t provide any new technology resources or advance the learning, however I realized that the reference was from 2016 and much of the tech that we see today wasn’t available (2016). \

Boettcher, J. V., & Conrad, R. (2016). The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and practical pedagogical tips, 2^nd ed. 

Bryans-Bongey, S., & Graziano, K. J. (2016). Online teaching in K-12: Models, methods, and best practices for teachers and administrators. Information today.

Khoo, E., & Bonk, C. (2022). Motivating and Supporting Online Learners. Commonwealth of learning.