Design for online and blended learning

How emotional presence influence our teaching?

According to Martha Cleveland-Innes emotion could be considered the 4th presence in education and learning, in addition to the teaching presence, cognitive presence and social presence. For me, definitely emotion is driving most of our decisions, in life in general and at work as well. We are, however, trained to control our emotions from a very early age in our society; a person who can control her/his emotion is considered more “stable” or “rational”. So in the online environment, emotion presence should definitely stands next to the teaching presence, cognitive presence and social presence. https://athabascau.adobeconnect.com/pyx24rifa1yw/?launcher=false&html-view=false

7 principles for blended and online learning described by Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes & Garrison, 2013 and in a nice slide set. https://drive.google.com/file/d/14xwrmmW8xA41pq-MGLap7lPVBkVeeW1n/view

• Design for open communication and trust
• Design for critical reflection and discourse
• Create and sustain sense of community
• Support purposeful inquiry
• Ensure students sustain collaboration
• Ensure that inquiry moves to resolution
• Ensure assessment is congruent with intended learning outcomes

When I read this I feel that it is impossible to reach this openness and goals. In the online world, time is the big issue, you have to go fast, information circulate very quickly and you should keep track. Putting in place all these tools to optimise online learning seems for me impossible, unless you have a long term collaboration where you can build up a community network and add constantly information in a reliable environment.

Five Stage Model

http://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

The model provides guidelines to designing and implementing e-learning activities and, to my point of view, matches the design of our ONL-course. I can recognise our work in this model. The stages are according to Gilly Salmon:

1. Access and motivation
2. Online Socialisation
3. Information Exchange
4. Knowledge Construction
5. Development

The model represents the amount of support students need during the course where the teacher becomes a facilitator and the students begin to take more of an active role in their own learning.

One question that pop-ups to my mind when I read all these nice reflections about creating the best blended learning network environment is: are these steps possible to implement in all type of learning? By this, I mean some learnings are more “deep reflection” while others are more related to “basic learning”. Can the 5 stages learning process works in both “learning types”.

Love the concept but again, I wonder how I could use this model in my own teaching. Sounds impossible for me to give this time in my schedule with the students, that is very tight.

My little experience in lecturing showed me that definitely, emotional presence is important. I can feel within few minutes if I managed to get the attention of the students (or not) with a small introduction on my role and who I am/why I am here today. But sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes not?! Is this related to the students, to the teachers or both (blended)?