I would like to start by introducing what I do for living. I am a teacher at an University of Applied Sciences where I have the privilege to create the future nurses. The main topics I teach in are clinical care and medication administration. I have ordinary lectures, skill stations where they learn how to do things and simulations where they get to use their knowledge in taking care of the patient. That was a short introduction, now back to what I want to reflect on.
By now I have realized how comfortable I have been with my courses at the University where I teach. “Doing as I always have done”. Taking the safe path. As the it-support at my university use to say: “If it works, don’t fix it!”. Serving the students with lectures, sharing my lectures on a platform, showing them YouTube videos every now and then… that’s teaching, isn’t it? But what about learning?
Do I want my students to be passive and only learn things by listening to me, or do I want to turn them into thinking, creative individual that want to participate in the community, to make it a little better for their children, to be part of creating the cure for cancer? How can I prepare them for those challenges?
I think collaborative learning is a way of helping students to realize that to achieve the goal, collaboration towards a shared purpose is needed. (Frenks 2018) They must learn to work together, to use each other’s special skills and knowledge, but also to learn how to share different perspectives. (Kozar 2010)
Collaborative learning can be learning online. For the learning to be effective, the group must learn to interact and be social online. To be social online differs from being social face-to-face and not many people are formally trained how to work together in an online environment. Specific pedagogical benefits of collaborative learning include development of critical thinking skills, co-creation of knowledge, reflection and transformative learning. (Blaschke, Brindley, Walti 2009)
I found a study about collaborative connectivism that I found quite interested. Connectivism is a learning theory that explains how the internet have created new opportunities for people to learn and share information across the world, online. Much learning can happen across peer networks that take place online. The teacher’s role is to guide students to information and support their learning. (Downes 2010, Siemens 2005)
I can see a lot common features in our ONL181 course to connectivism and this is the type of course I would be happy to build for my students. I can’t say I am ready for it yet, but I’m getting there and half way through the course I feel much more comfortable with the thought of it than I felt before this course. Guess I am learning and slowly getting more competent in this?
REFERENCES
Blaschke, L. M., Brindley, J. E., Walti, C. 2009. Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment. The International Review of Research in Open Distributed Learning. 3 (10)
Downes, S. (2010). New technology supporting informal learning. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, 2(1)
Frenks, F., Tenorio, G. P., Sharp, S. 2018. Online collaboration webinar. ONL181 course. Webinar held 31.10.2018
Kozar, O. 2010. Towards Better Group Work: Seeing the Difference between Cooperation and Collaboration. English Teaching Forum. Nr 2
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1)
Unicat 