How do we make online discussion and collaboration work for online students? This might just be one of the big questions, and challenges, of online education.
As a student enrolled at the Open University, I am currently studying a module called Technology-enhanced learning: practices and debates. The course is 100% online.
This gives me a student perspective on the issue of online student discussion and collaboration, an issue which is in my opinion sometimes discussed too exclusively in a closed context of practitioners and other education professionals.
In this blog post I would like to reflect a little on my experience of meeting, discussing and even collaborating with fellow Open University students.
Yesterday I was participating in an OU live session with two fellow students. The session is a real time skype-like way of meeting up and talking. These sessions are not scheduled as part of the course. Because of this, one of tne of the challenges of meeting is that you need initiative and planning to make it work, as different students usually work on the course at different times during the week. Time zones might also pose a challenge. However the experience of talking to a fellow student, hearing their voice and having a conversation resembling a physical meeting makes a big difference to me when interacting with other people. Another advantage for me, which others might find to be a disadvantage, is that these meetings are less formal, as there is no tutor/practitioner present unless you invite them. This makes for a more relaxed and open conversation in my opinion, which I think is better because it makes sharing insights and insecurities easier at a student level. As I also found out, it is can be important to have a clear focus for the conversation, unless the purpose is simply introducing yourself, getting to know each other and speaking in more general terms about the course. I will try to prepare better and have a clearer focus for the next meeting.
Another way of participating in the course is the asynchronous online tutor forums, that I mentioned before in this blog. The forums are used as an integrated part of the course design, and forum participation form an integrated part of many activities on the course. The activities often works like this: I am presented with content as a student, this can be research, articles, interviews. etc. It can be presented as various types of media. I am then told to discuss a series of prepared questions in a tutor group forum created for the current week of the course. This way of trying to scaffold activities around a forum in the LMS/VLE might be an improvement as opposed to just serving content in a course. You could also claim that the questions made up for each activity helps to focus the conversation in the forums. In reality however, what often happens is that students engage in the forums at different times during the week. Often, they/we discuss the questions posed for the forum and often students end up not interacting a lot with the comments of other students. So if the point is discussion and interaction, I think this definitely poses a challenge in terms of how to design the course. On top of this, I sometimes get a feeling that students are simply answering the questions briefly, because it is a requirement of the course. This again means that the content of the ‘discussions’ can be very fragmented.
A third way of participating, which I am doing at the moment, is writing this blog. In some ways, this is ok as I write my thoughts more freely. Someone might even read it and comment. A general point for me in all this is that it requires training and new habits to be able to reap the rewards of online communication and collaboration, even if you are used to using technology for other purposes. This is my second module at the OU, and I still feel like I am just starting out.