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Key take away - ethics before technology

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I think the most important issues that I learned concerned the ethics of open online learning. All these discussion took place in our lively ONL group 12. The ethical questions we discussed were multiple: how to protect student and faculty from cyberbullying and other sanctions when sharing; how to make sure that the tools we use will not extend electronic control on our students; how to make sure that the tools we choose do not increase students’ addictive social media use; how to ensure that when using electronic tools publicly available we know what we are making our students consent to (like pointed out by the Social Dilemma movie, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product); who are included and who are excluded when increasing open online learning as it seems that those who are well off already are the most active users of online learning opportunities; and last but not least what are we doing when we are supporting open online learning as active educational polic
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Community of Inquiry: old stuff in a new package?

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When you enter a new course like ONL you come with the expectation that the teaching materials will offer you new pedagogical approaches and ideas. Topic 4 on the course concerned design for online and blended learning. One of the keynotes as well as key reading for this section concerned Community of Inquiry as a pedagogical approach. It intrigued me right away and when I read more about it, I was a bit puzzled; the name of the model was new to me, but the contents were somehow all too familiar. It seemed that I had organized many of my face-to-face courses   pretty much according to the principles of Community of Inquiry approach but long before the book ‘Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry´(Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes and Garrison   2013) was published. Then it came to me, all this was pretty much the same stuff that I learned and have practiced since late 1990s’ under the label 'Cooperative Learning’ (Yhteistoiminnallinen oppim
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Community (of practice) in course environment – fantasy, rarity or reality?

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I have been lucky to have worked in a community of practice (Wenger, 2011) when I was a PhD student and young post-doctoral researcher. It was fantastic to be engaged in collective learning in developing our departmental practices, teaching and research. We had shared passion in one or all the domains we shared. Much of my learning took place without intentional effort just by participating in collective activities; by being invited to participate, by been giving voice and responsibility; by sharing my enthusiasm; by developing teaching collaboratively and teaching collaboratively and by collective writing and generous commenting and information sharing. Engaging in the activities of the community of practice molded me; turned me from a student into a researcher and educator with particular values and understandings.    I realized how much I had learned only when I left the organization and entered another one where I put all my learning into practice.  Reflecting back on my experience
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The unintended consequences of open online learning

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The advantages of open online learning are more than well-rehearsed on this course, but I feel that the disadvantages are hinted about but not openly addressed in the teaching materials like the lectures, videos and articles. Openly discussing the pros and cons would give a bit more balanced view of what can, and what cannot, be gained through open online education (for more information on the advantages and disadvantages please see Bali, 2014; Oudeweetering and Agirdag, 2018; Zhenghao et al., 2018). What seems to be missing in the studies dealing with open online learning is the examination and acknowledgement of open online learning as education policy and the political nature of educational transfer with potential unintended consequences. In the rest of the blog I will be dealing with these questions. International education started long before open online learning and MOOCs entered the scene. Educational systems have always developed relationally but what is new is the level of g
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Acquiring a digital looser identity – and how to loose it during ONL

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Discourses represent the world from a particular perspectives and shape how we can talk about a topic, for example digital literacy, and what kind of meaning we attach to the phenomenon. Discourses, thus, influence the way we construct our identities in powerful ways (Fairclough, 2003). Regardless of knowing all this, I had never really reflected upon how I had come to assume an identity of what Prensky (2001) calls digital immigrant, the one who can adjust/cope in digital environments but never quite hack it, always having at least one foot in the past. Born in the 1960’s where the internet was nowhere in sight during my school days, nor in my university days and not really even during my PhD studies. There was no google scholar. I was forced to physically visit different libraries and grind bookshelves in the basement in order to find the article I wanted. The first net based digital tools, the email and sms-messages, had just been invented, and I was eagerly using them, and have eve
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