ONL181

The time I spent exploring topic four has been frustrating but also fun and filled with curiosity. I am still in the pondering phase of making sense of the Gilly Salmon five-stage model. I have spent most of my time trying to figure out how the model is designed and how I can understand and approach the model. My first encounter with the model left me very confused. And I had a strong feeling that I didn’t like it very much. I could not tell why – it was just something with how the model is designed that did not make sense to me. So for me, the first days were all about trying to figure out why I reacted the way I did. Also at this time PBL group 4 decided that we will work with this model and try to combine scenario one and two (to put a spotlight on the role of the facilitator in the five stage model). This was an eye opener for me, because now I discovered one thing that might be a reason for why this model makes me feel confused. My confusion has to do with how the ...

Communities of Practice and the Online Learning Environment Brindley et al. 2009 argues that online courses can provide participants with a very social and engaging learning environment. The key word being social. Social is here about engagement. And engagement can take different forms, such as peer-to-peer collaboration or student-faculty interaction. It is about creating a space for active learning in which people can come together as a group and gain experience in how to work together in a more collaborative way (Brindley et al. 2009). Here it can be about the co-construction of knowledge. Yet they also point out critical factors, for example most people don’t have much experience with this type of learning (Brindley et al. 2009). This might mean that in addition to the learning goals of the course, the participants need also to learn new ways of approaching learning and develop new types of behaviours (that can be different to how interaction is carried out in in-person inte...