How much influence do students need or want in creating the learning experience? How much of a learning experience should be curated by the teacher? And how do learning preferences impact comprehension and retention, also known as cognition? Exploring and defining the tenets of optimal learning environments is a great challenge.
Our 526 team assignment is helping our cohort explore these challenges through an activity of our choosing. Our team, Alisha, Ben, Melissa, & Sharmila, chose to explore an open educational resource hosted on an eLearning platform in a community setting. The tenets of constructivist and social constructivist learning helped us establish common ground and momentum by reminding us to carefully define the environment (assignment) and carefully define the available tools and preferred methods.
This blog post outlines Team 4’s progress so far. We introduce our chosen learning event, our investigative process so far, and questions we hope to tackle during our team presentation.
We are exploring Pottle’s (2022) “Teaching online or hoarding frogs in a wheelbarrow” eLearning course from the Ontario eLearning Consortium (OELC). This ArticulateRise experience offers a self-assessment for teachers of all student ages but is curated by just one individual. Readers are encouraged to submit new ideas via email and therefore contribute to the intellectual depth of the course. However, upon initial review, we do not yet trust the author would incorporate new ideas into the curated materials. This disconnect between the collaborative invitation and the curator’s recognition of other contributors (or lack thereof) challenged us to explore the resource’s characteristics, including the community of possible contributors, and initiate our critical analysis deliberately.
Initially, we considered the resource a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC); however, the content’s collaborative and changing nature led us to define the platform as an artifact of a Community of Practice (CoP). Standard features of a CoP include 1) sharing resources, information, and skills, 2) advancing and creating knowledge, and 3) all associated with the specific needs and interests of one community (Akkerman et al., 2008; Dron & Anderson, 2014; Wenger, 2000). While there is more to a CoP, the challenge of defining our learning event initiated our investigative process.
At this time, our investigative process includes background readings that further define CoP (Wenger, 2011, Wiley, 2014) and compare the guiding principles of the author and the Ontario eLearning Consortium (OeLC website) with the neighbouring Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium (ERLC).
Most interestingly, we confirmed that our learning event was NOT an open educational resource (OER) as defined by Wiley (2014) because the OeLC community guidelines do not explicitly permit participants to retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute content. In addition, our OeLC resource in question is not shared with a Creative Commons license, counter to the traditional CoP intention whereby resources are freely shared between all parties.
Although our team discussions inspired creative and intriguing viewpoints and more questions than we had time for in this collaborative assignment, we narrowed our investigations to the following.
- Alisha: How does engagement through social presence affect cognition?
- Ben: How does the resource utilize constructivist and behaviourist learning methods?
- Melissa: How do misinformation and bias affect resource quality (credibility & accuracy), especially when community members are encouraged to contribute?
- Sharmila: How do we define quality? Who gets to define quality?
Learning is messy (Cormier, 2017), and finding common ground is challenging when the environment is fuzzy or difficult to define. To help us establish a clearer vision for eLearning experiences that respect both the reader’s time and the value of their lived experiences for future readers, we look forward to continuing our investigation in the coming week and sharing our insights with you during our presentation.
Therefore, we invite you to share your thoughts about a recent eLearning or Community of Practice experience. Did you get a chance to contribute or comment? What other elements helped you enjoy the experience?
References
Akkerman, S., Petter, C., & de Laat, M. (2008). Organizing communities‐of‐practice: facilitating emergence. Journal of Workplace Learning, 20(6), 383–399. https://doi.org/10.1108/13665620810892067
Boros, C. (n.d.). eLearning at the Upper Canada District School Board, supported by the OeLC. https://www.oelc.ca/testimonial/
Cormier, D. (2017, April 18). MALAT Virtual Symposium: Intentional messiness of online communities, [webinar]. https://malat-coursesite.royalroads.ca/lrnt521/dave-cormier-virtual-symposium-presentation/
Dron, J, & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds. Athabasca University Press. (Note: free PDF available for download). Chapter 4 – 7.
ERLC. (n.d.). What is a community of practice? https://www.communityofpractice.ca/background/what-is-a-community-of-practice/
Hildreth, P. M. (2004). Going virtual : distributed communities of practice. Idea Group Pub. Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https://www-igi–global-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/gateway/book/430.
Selwyn, N. (2010), Looking beyond learning: notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26: 65-73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00338.x
Veletsianos, G. (2021, May 31). Effectiveness, Efficiency, Engagement and Equity in Online and Blended Learning settings. Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences – Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association(OTESSA) [Online Keynote Session], University of Alberta, AB. https://www.veletsianos.com/2021/05/31/otessa-2021-congress-keynote-effectiveness-efficiency-engagement-wheres-equity/
Wenger, E. (2011). Communities of practice: A brief introduction.https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=wenger+communities+of+practice+a+brief+introduction&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
Wiley, D., (2014, March 5). The Access Compromise and the 5th R. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221
Hello Fab-4, thanks for your great questions about engagement, teaching presence, and elements that add to an online learning experience. Recently I enrolled in a professional certificate program at work with participants from around the world, but mostly from the US. The online modules were self-paced: recorded videos with an easy to follow along workbook. The course also came with three synchronous Zoom sessions formatted as 30 minutes of facilitator presentation, 30 minutes of break out rooms, and 30 minutes of sharing and debriefing. My first two sessions were great, I had extremely interactive group members who were eager to collaborate on the break out room activities. My last session made me rethink my decision to participate: out of our group of 5, three never participated beyond initial greetings, and an awkward half hour of silence followed. I had a brief collaborative discussion with the only other active participant to answer the questions in the activity, and could not have been more relieved to finish the break out session. There was no facilitator presence in any of the breakout sessions so why did the last one go so poorly? What strategies can we use to ensure that these types of experiences are minimized in eLearning?
Team 4, I would definitely agree with your assessment that the funneling of participant contributions to the OELC course though one person via email raises questions as to the nature of the overall project. Along with the points you’ve raised, a CoP also operates as a peer network, based on trust, with some core participants and some peripherally involved but there to participate at a variety of levels based on their interests and needs, but always toward a common theme. Any lack of trust would constitute a weak link in the chain. Participants share their knowledge and practice experience as they engage in the community. A CoP need not necessarily set up its content, contributions and artifacts as OER, although it might, and access does not necessarily need to be open to anyone, as in the case of professionals such as teachers, nurses etc. who want to develop their own community with interests specific to them. If more openness in both content and participation are desired, then it’s definitely pointing towards a MOOC, which tends to be more episodic and less stable a community than a CoP. But…the lines can blur. Team 2’s post on MOOCs has some good background, definitions and distinctions on MOOCs (i.e. open vs not) that might be good background as well.