{"id":396,"date":"2022-04-18T20:33:02","date_gmt":"2022-04-19T03:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0206\/?p=396"},"modified":"2022-04-20T17:58:47","modified_gmt":"2022-04-21T00:58:47","slug":"2022-04-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0206\/2022-04-18\/","title":{"rendered":"526.1.3 – Team Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are exploring Pottle’s (2022) “Teaching online or hoarding frogs in a wheelbarrow<\/a>” 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n