Knowledge Flow: Vertical to Horizontal: Exploring blended learning guidelines to turn a silent class into a workable Community of Practice
Machiko Ohta
H818 Conference Poster
Multimedia poster: text and imagery, all the text is narrated
H818 Conference Abstract
The outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 forced a vast range of educational opportunities around the world to go online. The unexpected shift brought an unpredicted positive effect to six online asynchronous undergraduate courses at a university in Japan.
The courses were instructed by a part-time instructor, who had been struggling to induce positive responses from students in the classroom, especially voluntary questions. The classroom was full of fifty serious listeners. They gazed at the blackboard, tuned pages as the lecture went, and took notes earnestly. But the room fell completely silent when the instructor requested questions. No one raised their hand to raise a question. Every student seemed to retreat into a transparent shelter, letting the instructor feel like a witness to an instance of banking education (Freire, 1970), a vertical, one-way flow of knowledge.
With one-month notice, the instructor embarked on her first set of on-demand learning courses in the style of a series of radio programs accompanied with original study guides in PDFs in May 2020. Unanticipatedly, a series of voluntary questions followed. Why did her continuous efforts to get active responses from her students in a classroom fail? How should she put this experience into a cycle for learning analytics (Ferguson and Buckingham Shum, 2012) to implement a drastic change in knowledge flow in a learning community, vertical to horizontal?
The presentation assumes that the concept of blended learning (Garrison and Kanuka, 2004) has some clues to the answer, and conducts a small scale of literature review on blended learning guidelines (Valkenburg et al., 2020; Goeman et al., 2018; Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), 2018; Porter and Graham, 2016; Henrie et al., 2015; Erstad, 2009; Marshall, 2007).
The presentation also assumes that analysing how a good practice of blended learning works will involve revealing how a good Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998) evolves. Demystifying the sequence of voluntary questions will also be required in the perspective of the social presence sphere of a Community of Practice (Wenger, 2004; Wenger and Snyder, 2000).
(360 words)
References
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Ferguson, R. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2012) ‘Social learning analytics: five approaches’, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge. 2330616. ACM [Online]. Available at https://dl-acm-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/citation.cfm?doid=2330601.2330616 (Accessed 25 May 2019).
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Herder and Herder.
Garrison, D. R. and Kanuka, H. (2004) ‘Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education’, The Internet and Higher Education, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 95–105. [Online]. Available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751604000156 (Accessed 9 November 2020).
Goeman, K., Poelmans, S., Rompaey, V. V. and University of Leuven, Belgium (2018) Research report on state of the art in blended learning and innovation [Online]. Available at https://embed.eadtu.eu/php/downloadFile.php?mediaId=2435&fileName= (Accessed 9 November 2020).
Henrie, C. R., Halverson, L. R. and Graham, C. R. (2015) ‘Measuring student engagement in technology-mediated learning: A review’, Computers & Education, vol. 90, no., pp. 36-53. [Online]. Available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131515300427 (Accessed 2 December 2020).
Marshall, S. (2007) E-Learning Maturity Model: Process Descriptions [Online]. Available at http://e-learning.geek.nz/emm/documents/versiontwothree/20070620ProcessDescriptions.pdf (Accessed 9 November 2020).
Porter, W. W. and Graham, C. R. (2016) ‘Institutional drivers and barriers to faculty adoption of blended learning in higher education’, British journal of educational technology, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 748–762. [Online]. Available at https://web-b-ebscohost-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=9649be16-3ea9-4ce2-bf57-7ad05b624776%40pdc-v-sessmgr04&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=115995110&db=ehh (Accessed 2 December 2020).
Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) (2018) Statutory Quality Assurance Guidelines for Providers of Blended Learning Programmes [Online]. Available at https://www.qqi.ie/Publications/Publications/Statutory%20QA%20Guidelines%20for%20Blended%20Learning%20Programmes.pdf (Accessed 2 December 2020).
Valkenburg, W. F. v., Dijkstra, W. P., Arcos, B. d. l., Goeman, K., Rompaey, V. v. and Poelmans, S. (2020) European Maturity Model for Blended Education[Online]. Available at https://embed.eadtu.eu/download/2470/European%20Maturity%20Model%20for%20Blended%20Education.pdf?inline=1 (Accessed 2 December 2020).
Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E. (2004) ‘Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice’, Ivey Business Journal (Online), vol., no., pp. 1–8. [Online]. Available at http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/knowledge-management-as-doughnut-shaping-your/docview/216184915/se-2?accountid=14697
Wenger, E. C. and Snyder, W. M. (2000) ‘Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 78, no. 1, pp. 139–145. [Online]. Available at http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=2628915&site=ehost-live&scope=site (Accessed 4 December 2020).
H818 Conference Website
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/OU-H818/
Comments
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I am looking forward to watching your presentation Machiko and interested to see how you have adapted to blended learning. The poster was very good.
Excited to see your presentation!
I liked your poster! It is very relatable - I am curious to learn what conclusions you draw.How were the students asking questions
I am interested in knowing more about whether the students were asking questions of you that others could hear/see/respond to? Were they less inhibited to ask when they could no see others - they did not wish to break the silence around them? (Loved your description of that silence and your joy at hearing a first, second, third question!Conference questions
Well done on your conference presentation Machiko!
These are the questions that you were asked on the day, for you to respond to however you choose:
Do you think your findings are relevant widely in Japan - is this reticence to participate a common feature of education?
Can you explain what you mean by a vertical flow of knowledge?
How are you sharing, or planning to share, the findings from your project?
Is trust the most important element in building online communities?
How do you foster trust?