Tag Archives: community of inquiry

Diversity, Facilitating Online Learning, Teacher/Academic work

cross-disciplinary Collaboration on course design (#EDUC99070)

1 Comment

Shared Interests: “Community of Inquiry”

Undertaking the subject “Facilitating Online Education” (EDUC99070), one of the key elements was to develop a “Community of Inquiry”. In the first instance, we were a diverse group of staff working across different specialist/discipline areas with the University of Melbourne. We were generally all interested in (further) developing skills to better adapt to the changes due to the impacts of the Covid pandemic that enforced the necessity for online teaching and learning. I was the only one with an Education background, and working with the MGSE (Melbourne Graduate School of Education).

Over the first few weeks, we were introduced to a number of different platforms in which to build and share our own ePortfolios using edublogs.org and to join numerous free platforms/apps easily available through linking up online.

Some of these included:

and a number of other platforms… I found myself lost amongst numerous open tabs on my computer, not quite knowing which ones would be most useful for my needs, logging on through email address (I have a few) Google, Facebook, Outlook, UniMelb … all different passwords and login processes. At one point I noticed I had over 80 tabs open across two web browsers.

Today’s open Tabs…

And then it was finding the time to ‘play’ (that is, ‘learn how to use’), linking it appropriately with the necessary ongoing teaching work and family/home responsibilities, rediscovering a range of sites I had joined and built up over the previous ten years or so, and to absorb new information with rapid and brief outlines. And then there were the new acronyms: EOR, COI, SOTEL, DBR, AR, VR, MMR … and masses of links to readings that I couldn’t find time for, and when I did, just couldn’t absorb it due to the language, content, terminology, and way(s) they were written.

So back to our Community of Inquiry (COI)…

There are many outlines, descriptions, and examples of this popular framework to be found. (Refer to my previous Post: https://abelspace.edublogs.org/2021/06/01/university-of-melbourne-online-study/ ). This key statement is derived from Dewey’s work (1938) on a community of inquiry – requiring three interdependent elements: a cognitive presence (the learner), a social presence (the learning community) and a teaching presence (the professor).

“An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding” http://www.thecommunityofinquiry.org/coi

In my experience, although we had the essential elements of a COI, I found myself feeling further and further disconnected – not so much any missing elements from the above triad, but lacking a sense of common purpose, of active collaboration, actively supporting each other, and personally, of being further out on the periphery, and falling way behind. I don’t believe I was the only one however, but found myself activating the inevitable self-critique – fraudster, can’t keep up, over-stressed, can’t remember all these passwords/login procedures/acronyms … I could no longer even stand to have my camera on during our weekly meets.

My on-screen presence – I couldn’t even work out how to upload a photo for my profile!

Our first ‘assessment task’ was to populate our ePortfolios, most of us choosing to share via ‘edublogs’ platform. I was quite excited about this as I’ve had a WordPress blog for a number of years (https://abelspace.wordpress.com/), I enjoy writing and illustrating, and I am one for constantly questioning what is around me. However, I did not do this for recognition, career advancement, lots of followers or fame, I did it partly to document my journey and thoughts, and partly to use as a ‘reflective journal’, where I could try to make sense of my thoughts and to see how I may have changed over this time. I thought, why not do this in a ‘public space’, I’ve got nothing to lose.

I dutifully set up my new blog (you are here now!) and began to add content, covering a number of topics and venting myself in various ways. To date, this is my 16th post, and I keep having ideas for more. I have had 16 Comments, made by 4 individuals in total.

https://abelspace.edublogs.org/ Comments 3 June, 2021

Part of our task was to make comments on other people’s blogs. I spent some time reading blogs written by my peers, and found them generally interesting, sometimes engaging, but rarely provocative or activating or inviting my further engagement or response. Amy Gray’s blog however, and her comments on my blog, did pique my interest.

We did end up working together and sharing ideas for Assessment tasks 2 & 3: To present an online Draft proposal for the implementation of a blended or fully online unit, and to build an LMS Unit prototype, including revised proposal.

Reflections on our ‘mini’ Community of Inquiry

  • Finding and following up a ‘shared interest‘, initially through noticing each other’s oral contributions during our course zoom mtgs, and then interacting (commenting) on each other’s individual blog sites.
  • Spurred originally by us both having worked in Lao PDR, with a place and culturally based ongoing interest in the region, the people and its uniqueness, as well as challenges in working across linguistic and cultural borders.
  • Amy wrote a very well considered comment in response to one of my blogs about Module 7 ‘Immersive Reality’ (IR) and ‘Virtual Reality’ (VR), in which we both recognised the potential for students’ ‘safe immersion’ into challenging and potentially distressing socio-cultural contexts, particularly in terms of current travel restrictions, and of ‘building empathy’ and developing cultural competencies.
  • We were both very impressed by Stephen Aiello’s presentation: Developing culturally responsive practice using mixed reality (XR) simulation in Paramedicine which gives an excellent overview of how this team has tried to utilise XR simulation to fulfil a similar purpose. However, this and most other examples of XR/VR or 360 views, involve places and objects, with an absence of people, which is still an issue I am wanting to explore further.
  • Although our disciplines and faculties differ (Health/Education), we were both interested in how these technologies could be useful in helping our students to better understand and learn these skills of “Culturally Responsive Practice” which I teach about explicitly in my course.
  • We further discovered that we had both considered ‘giving up the course’, finding EDUC99070 overwhelming and difficult to engage with the content, technical jargon and concepts, readings and perhaps also our ‘peers’.
  • So our collaboration and interest in each other’s work and thinking moved onto email contact and then telephone conversations and to shared Microsoft documents, Adobe Spark and Padlet.
  • We initially talked about a shared course design or unit within a broader course, focussed on combining our disciplines with a common focus on “Culturally Responsive Practice”, that could be offered to both those working in Education and in Health. We could share our expertise and look for common elements across disciplinary boundaries.
  • As it turned out, it was a community made up of very different personalities, the Pragmatist (Amy) and the Esoteric (me). While I worked away at bringing together relevant ‘content’, to be developed through my knowledge area of pedagogy that is second nature to me, Amy suggested we work together on a course she was already responsible for developing, and already made a start on, “Global Child Health – a discovery subject for the Melbourne MD”. This meant we already had a reason for doing it, a general framework, shared interest in learning from and sharing with each other, and the possibility of getting it completed for Assessment!

Final Reflections

I highlighted above, some of the elements that made for a successful team collaboration and output. In hindsight, I’m not sure this is quite what Dewey meant by a Community of Inquiry. But in terms of pedagogy, I was drawn back to the notion of collaboration …

A Community of Inquiry can be described as:

a group of people […] who use discussion to engage in deep thinking, explore big ideas, and grapple with the challenges and possibilities in a puzzling concept, idea or circumstance’

(Museum Victoria n.d.)

This form of community of inquiry was developed by Matthew Lipman 2003) […who] argued that a community of inquiry is characterised by; ‘non adversarial deliberations, shared cognitions, the cultivation of literacy and philosophical imagination and the encouragement of deep reading, and the enjoyment of dialogical texts’ (Lipman 2003). Moreover, Lipman’s account of a community of inquiry  includes the following features: inclusiveness, participation, shared cognition, face-to face relationships, the quest for meaning, feelings of social solidarity, deliberation, impartiality, modelling, thinking for oneself, challenging as a procedure, reasonableness, the reading, the questioning and the discussion

https://rrr.edu.au/unit/module-2/topic-4/collaborative-classrooms/

The above quote is related to classroom teaching, but is pedagogically relevant to both what Amy and I did together, and what this course (EDUC99070) set out to achieve.

(Note, I retain the use of the term ‘pedagogy’ – rather than other introduced terms such as ‘andragogy’ or ‘heutagogy’ . I realise this is controversial – see https://elmlearning.com/pedagogy-vs-andragogy/ but I believe that anyone who is well versed in pedagogical theory, is able to modify their approach according to the age/experience of students/learners, but the basic theories are always relevant.)

Effective pedagogy is about relationships. Building relationships, emphasising empathy, recognising and overcoming biases, noticing, listening, facilitating, encouraging, being genuine, being as ‘authentic’ as possible, knowing your subject/knowing your learners, being fair, being just and believing in the importance of what and who we teach for a better future world.

At this concluding point of the course, Amy and I hope to continue collaborating and working on these ideas together. I know that I have developed more knowledge of the technology out there, more confidence in my own grounding in Education theory (particularly Curriculum & Pedagogy) as being relevant to learners at all levels, become far more interested in developing approaches and expertise into better online/dual mode delivery, and developed a far better understanding of how education is being actualised in the University of Melbourne context. I am looking forward to actively pursuing relationships with others with shared interests, to working with my course co-ordinators in developing their online course designs, and ‘finding the time to play’ mentioned at the outset of this post!

References

Akdere, M., Acheson, K., Jiang, Y. (2021)
An examination of the effectiveness of virtual reality technology for intercultural competence development,
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Volume 82, Pages 109-120, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.03.009.

Batt-Rawden, Samantha A. MBChB; Chisolm, Margaret S. MD; Anton, Blair; Flickinger, Tabor E. MD, MPH Teaching Empathy to Medical Students, Academic Medicine: August 2013 – Volume 88 – Issue 8 – p 1171-1177 doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e318299f3e3

Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Hold Rinehart and Winston

Lipman, M 2003, Thinking in Education, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Facilitating Online Learning, Review, Teacher/Academic work

University of Melbourne online study

1 Comment

Ongoing Progression of study modes at University of Melbourne…

Link to original Marketing Post 26 April, 2021

Note: I have copied sections of the original marketing post below, which appeared on my Facebook feed, and highlighted areas for further consideration. I have a lot of respect for David Seignior with whom I work in my teaching team, and I found that beyond the hype of such a marketing post, there are a number of points made here that warrant further thought and consideration in terms of working with technology for hybrid/online learning (#EDUC90970), and emphasising relational pedagogy and social/cultural considerations within teaching/facilitating learning and curriculum planning.

Online professional education at Melbourne was designed with an online environment in mind. This matters.

Pedagogy before technology

One key pillar is learning design. As Senior Learning Designer at the University of Melbourne, David Seignior says: “Probably the most important consideration when building an online learning platform is that effective curriculum design comes before the technology.”

Technologies to deliver remote learning might be abundant, but “you have to know how to use it effectively. Whether face-to-face or online, you need to look not just at what you are teaching but how you’re teaching it. The technology must serve the pedagogy not the other way around.”

“We always work back from what the learner needs to be able to know and do in that particular context, and then consider how that can be learnt and assessed in an engaging manner online,” says Seignior.

Learner-centric programs and best practice

Specific needs of the learner are addressed at this early stage too. Since post-professional learners are often time poor, this characteristic is built into the design. As Lead Learning Designer, David Hall, says:

“We need to help them learn and understand as quickly and clearly as possible: provide them only with material that helps them achieve the learning outcomes, make it authentic, and ensure there is variety.”

Another potential of good online learning is to develop a Community of Inquiry, that allows students to learn with, from and about each other, says Seignior. The Community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) has three key elements: social presence, cognitive presence, and teacher presence to enable effective peer learning and student satisfaction. Some think online learning is set and forget, that it is purely about self-directed learning with minimal teacher presence post design. But teacher presence is a really important aspect of the online learning experience. The more the teacher is present – whether instructing in webinars, facilitating web tutorials or conversing in discussion boards and giving feedback– the more interactive and engaging the learning will be for the student and the more they will feel part of a learning cohort.”

Advanced technology

… things like virtual collaboration tools, which allow learners to work on real-world scenarios, and even access places that they otherwise couldn’t physically go. A development in teaching healthcare for example allows students to ‘walk through’ an operating theatre during surgery.

Discussion boards and activities such as interactive videos and case studies, simulations and games, are also used to support collaboration and connection between learners, peers and tutors. One example is the learning interactive, which sees nursing students compete to accurately identify heart rhythms in the fastest possible time. These collaborative activities are a real benefit of online learning, notes Seignior.

“It’s ironic that we compare online and face-to-face. To me, online is more face-to-face than face-to-face. In a lecture theatre, the only person you’re face to face with is the lecturer– all of your peers, you’re looking at the back of their heads. Done well, online is more of a tutorial type setting. It really allows genuine peer learning to take place.”

Referencing back to previous post… teacher academics & content generation (excerpts)

Returning to excerpts from Previous Post on this blog in reference to this article: Academics aren’t content creators, and it’s regressive to make them so…

“So, we were told to “flip the classroom”. Why not edit those lecture recordings into 15-minute, bite-sized lessons […] Suddenly academics became video editors – mostly bad ones – and our students turned to YouTube, because on YouTube you can get a better explanation of the same thing (for free I might add). Universities turned from communities of learning and collaboration into B-grade content providers. This is the death march of higher education. Universities are not content providers.”

The philosopher John Dewey told us that an educational experience – what he called a community of inquiry – requires a cognitive presence (the learner), a social presence (the learning community) and a teaching presence (the professor).

Content can enable learning, but it cannot provide an education.

Education should be better than ever, as we are now able to point at myriad incredible resources, possibly on the web, perhaps in our library, where we act as content aggregator, not creator. Creation is done when we have our researcher hats on, not our teaching hats.

When we go online, when those classes are recorded then transformed into 15-minute snacks, the soul of education begins to die. The community of inquiry must be reinvented for the digital campus.

A quarter century ago, Noam further predicted that “the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community”.

We, as teachers in modern university settings, can think of ourselves as community figureheads and team leaders. The students are part of our community, our team, and we are there to manage them, coach them, guide them, to be mentors, to help teach them over a longer journey, and to corral them through this common goal of thought, understanding and mastery.”

Link to original opinion article: Academics aren’t content creators, and it’s regressive to make them so…

 And returning back to University of Melbourne online study (marketing promotion)

Notes/excerpts:

  • Effective curriculum design comes before the technology
  • look not just at what you are teaching but how you’re teaching it. The technology must serve the pedagogy not the other way around.
  • work back from what the learner needs to be able to know and do in that particular context, and then consider how that can be learnt and assessed in an engaging manner online,
  • “We need to help them learn and understand as quickly and clearly as possible: provide them only with material that helps them achieve the learning outcomes, make it authentic, and ensure there is variety.”
  • … develop a Community of Inquiry, that allows students to learn with, from and about each other, says Seignior. The Community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) has three key elements: social presence, cognitive presence, and teacher presence to enable effective peer learning and student satisfaction.
  • Some think online learning is set and forget, that it is purely about self-directed learning with minimal teacher presence post design. But teacher presence is a really important aspect of the online learning experience. The more the teacher is present – whether instructing in webinars, facilitating web tutorials or conversing in discussion boards and giving feedback– the more interactive and engaging the learning will be for the student and the more they will feel part of a learning cohort.”

Online learning can be more interactive than face to face? Here is why! (Podcast 21:14)

THIS TEACHING LIFE

In this episode, David Seignior, senior learning designer from the University of Melbourne, explains in what ways online teaching allows teachers to actively engage with their students in learning, and how that can be achieved even with minimal technological interventions.

The value of online education and how teachers can boost an engaging student experience

(excerpts)

“…contemporary, well-designed online education moves well beyond these old models into an experience defined by:

  • Social presence: the idea of learning together
  • Cognitive presence: the knowledge you’re sharing
  • Teacher presence: where teachers curate content and facilitate engagement.

[…] Seignior emphasises that teachers who are new to online education shouldn’t feel intimidated by the technology. While the technology does provide enormous opportunities, the pedagogical perspective is always paramount.

“You need to put the pedagogy (or andragogy for adult learning) before the technology… good teaching practices in face-to-face teaching apply in an online context as well.”

He believes there are three essential elements to successful online teaching:

  1. You facilitate
  2. You encourage collaboration
  3. You curate.”

Final Comments

It is interesting to see similarities in each of the above content/articles in terms of teaching/learning, online platforms, the work and/or responsibilities of the different contributors and participants. Although there are some points of difference, I love that Dewey’s work (1938) on a community of inquiry – requires a cognitive presence (the learner), a social presence (the learning community) and a teaching presence (the professor) can still be used with confidence and as a continuing guiding aspiration.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32442058

This last article, from 10 Jun 2020, demonstrates how far we have come in such a short period of time.  Engaging with today’s wholly online Teaching and Learning Conference, 2021 with a series of presentations that focus on evidence-based approaches for enhancing and optimising student learning, considering the shift in the balance of blended teaching, learning and assessment towards online and to different forms of in-person education, reflecting the greater confidence and competence of teachers (and students) with digital methods. (from the About:  Transitioning to COVID-normal: Developing a new ecosystem for learning).

My experience of these sessions was of a far more knowledgeable and experienced teaching cohort who were able to share their experiences, research and techniques with a very interested audience of University of Melbourne staff.  As a participant, I hope this is not just my impression (I was interested and gained a lot from participating – including being inspired to write a few more posts for this blog!) and is not simply a ‘marketing/promotional spiel’, but a sign of positive change and improvements to teaching and learning in all its forms, including to adapting our practices to current challenges + opportunities, but retaining attention to the various perspectives I have outlined in this post.

References

Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Hold Rinehart and Winston

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 7-23.

Tanner, B. (2020, February 23). Evollution. Taking Initiative to Bring Back Adults.