Flexible, Open, Social Learning: Supporting Learning #FOS4L

Today we’re looking at ‘Curating’ – how do we ensure that we don’t just collect content for ourselves, but share it (combining with advice as to what is useful).

“Students expect academic, technical, administrative  and pastoral support as part of their educational provision.” – especially distance learning students, and this makes a difference to success and retention.

Undertake one of the following activities:

1. Responding: Create a response to the scenario on your own or with others based on the discoveries you made through investigating this. Remember, you might find the FISh model useful. (ilo-1)
2. Reflecting: Think about supporting learning and reflect on your current practice. Where are the challenges and opportunities? What could you do to help your students? (ilo-2)
3. Making: Create a poster that provides useful tips and reminder to self and others about how to support learning effectively. Find a way to curate this resource (ilo-3)

Going for 1) – respond to scenario here, as we used student blogging for a module pretty successfully. We emphasised the fact that material going public meant that students needed to pay more attention before they pressed ‘post’, and noted that someone public giving them feedback that the tutor might have given has extra weight because it’s “real world” comments! It’s good to encourage the students that for their own learning, this is good, and to refer back to Seth Godin in 2009 – it doesn’t matter who reads it – it’s all part of learning, and as you improve – people will want to read it. The other layer that we added to it was to encourage students to comment on each other’s work (including within their small groups – who we met with regularly within teaching time to ensure progress was occurring!).

Video: the importance of teacher presence, and being aware of teacher presence was key … and not just doing things the way we thought they want, but listening to what is needed. If establish benchmark of expectation in the first 2 weeks – that is key. Online environments are much more democratic, and international students feel a space to speak up, people no longer feel like isolated learners. Use the offline/private messaging to contact a student to see if there’s a problem, or public boards that highlight the positive work that’s been done – students respond to that. Set expectations for engagement – differentiated by grade – highest grades, post, respond, synthesise.

Options to make infographics with https://infogr.am/ or http://piktochart.com/.