3c. Online and blended learning

Evidence of competence in ISTE-CS

You can do a lot of learning during synchronous meetings. But what can you do asynchronously to support your synchronous work? There are surely many answers to this question, but there are two things I would implement for a professional learning community which I’m currently in: a Slack channel for communication between meetings, and quick writing assignments on participant-decided reflection questions. (Slack is a messaging app with a lot of functionalities that you can add. See my blog post, Slack.com – Communication management, for more information about Slack.)

My group meets every two weeks. Our goal is to investigate what makes a good abstract, outline, talk, and poster. We generate knowledge together and there is no direct instruction. At the end of a meeting we decide what we want to do, individually, before our next meetings. For example, between meetings we have read articles, analyzed a collection of abstracts, or used a procedure we generated during a meeting to draft a research poster. Our meetings have been extremely valuable and I have learned a lot.

But I wish we had an online component to our meetings. I wish that when we were apart and working on our assignments, we had a place, like a Slack channel, to share our thoughts or ask questions. I believe that engaging in conversation around your learning goals supports that learning, and so an outlet for continued conversation is something that I see as beneficial.

Secondly, I wish we had a norm of proposing reflective writing questions to each other, and then sharing our answers in collaborative writing spaces. We have sort of done this once, at my request (I say sort of because only half of the group has posted their responses). The reason that I asked us to do this was because after spending a ton of time discussing what makes a good abstract, I wanted to know what their final takeaways were before we moved on - the most “updated” version of everyone’s thoughts. I wanted to do this as an asynchronous, reflective writing assignment because I wanted to have time to think about what I wanted to say, and I wanted to know what they had to say when they had time, too. Reflective work itself takes time, and communicating about your reflective work is well suited for the online portion of blended learning.

But the thing that was most important to me about my reflective writing prompt was that it was participant-generated, and itself generated through the prompt “what do you have questions about or want to know?” The questions generated by this prompt may not always be well suited for online writing tasks, but I think the fact that mine was reflective is what makes it well suited for an online space. In terms of where to share reflective writing, I have decided that I really like using Google Docs because you can comment on specific sentences, and tag people in your comments.

A reasonable question you might ask is: If your learning is self-directed, why can’t you make these things happen? My answer is: Our meetings are coming to an end, and the experience itself is what has given me the opportunity to reflect on which digital, asynchronous elements I wish we had incorporated to support our learning. Next time I participate in something like this, I will be more prepared suggest the use of a Slack channel and participant-generated reflective writing prompts right away.