Having decided to study the FutureLearn MOOC ‘Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started‘ (beginning 2nd Nov 2015), I decided to take on the course’s suggestion that learners might wish to record their thoughts throughout the 5 week programme via a ‘reflective log’.
The idea is that people studying the course can use a log to ‘collect useful ideas, links, and resources, and to refine your thoughts and plans as you work through the course’. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a public blog (in fact many reflective logs could be private, or may just be shared with the course convenor), but I felt it would do no harm to share my experiences of the course in a public space, so others might also be able to benefit from the ideas I’ve collated over the duration of the MOOC.
This is actually the first MOOC I have ever properly studied (having briefly started, but not kept up with, another FutureLearn course on ‘Cyber Security’), and I am hoping to benefit from it in two main ways:
- Firstly, I hope that putting myself in the shoes of a learner will help me to get a better understanding of what does and doesn’t work in terms of distance-learning, thus giving me a valuable experience from which I can improve the development of our own distance-learning courses at the University of Nottingham.
- Secondly, the course itself looks like it will contain some very useful subject matter for those like myself who develop e-learning courses. While the course is primarily targeted at those in the ‘Vocational Education and Training’ sectors, those studying in Higher Education are equally welcome (and in fact, with my role at Nottingham being very much focused on development of modules for those out in industry, the vocational emphasis should therefore suit me pretty well).
So, without further ado, here is my log of ideas and inspiration thoughout the course:
Week 1: Why Should We Focus On Blended Learning?
The course started with a slick video introduction from Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris, the lead educators on the course. I always think this is a great way to get people initially engaged in the content of a course. Learners were then encouraged to introduce themselves in the discussion thread (to my knowledge, all FutureLearn MOOCs have a heavy emphasis on interactivity through discussion forums).
We were then given the suggestion that we may want to start our own ‘reflective log’ (thus, this blog post!).
There was also a link to an interesting Jisc article on ‘Five reasons why you should “do digital”‘, which highlighted a few key reasons why utilising technology in learning is so crucial, notably:
- New platforms for reaching learners (e.g. VLEs and social media, the latter of which is being used by a surprising 40% of students in FE/HE).
- More engaging (such as using gamification as a more interesting way of learning things via repetition).
- Boosting employability, by improving all students’ digital literacy.
- Supporting professional development (i.e. educators should keep up-to-date with emerging trends).
- More sustainable, by appealing to a wider range of potential students, e.g. mature students, or those living in more isolated/rural areas.
Participants were then introduced to an online glossary (via ‘MediaWiki’) which anyone could contribute definitions to. This could be a good technique to get students on a course to participate in ‘active learning’ by writing and editing definitions for technical terms. Again, this is one of many good examples of how features used in this MOOC will hopefully inspire people like myself to incorporate those techniques into our own courses.
Along the way, there were also several videos to watch – One of which summarised the merits of digital learning into four nice categories:
- Storage – i.e. storing and distributing material electronically is much more cost-effective than print.
- Access – The fact that students can access material anywhere, anytime.
- Multimedia – The advantages of utilising a range of multimedia and how this can benefit learning.
- Personalised – The ability of digital learning to instantly provide customised feedback and respond to the actions of the learner, something which a traditional book could never achieve.
We then had a couple of short quizzes/exercises to encourage people to think about what constitutes blended learning, and to think of some examples. I was not 100% convinced by some of the model examples given, but again the discussion forums provide a good opportunity to express opinions about this.
One of the exercises also had the ability to input your email address so that you could be emailed a summary of the questions, your answers, and the model answers. I think this is a good way for students to keep a record of their progress, and it’s something I might consider integrating into our own courses. (This is another good example of how the tutors of ‘Blended Learning Essentials’ are in the enviable position that the very act of studying the course in itself helps to achieve some of its learning objectives, i.e. by inspiring participants to try out the blended learning techniques featured).
That’s all for now – I’ll be posting more as I work through the course.
Update: So, to my shame, it turns out I’m one of the 90%* of people who don’t manage to complete MOOCs. Work unfortunately got in the way of managing to finish this one! I thought I’d leave this post here for the time being, given that some of it was still a useful exercise…
( * This figure varies pretty significantly from source to source!)
James Roscoe's EdTech Blog 