On connecting: A first reflection

It is always exciting to enter a new learning community – or at least, to enter what will become a learning community through the efforts of its members to engage with one another and with the material. This week we connected online with the ONL community as well as the PBL group (aside: why does every new thing one starts involve a whole slew of acronyms?), and right out of the gate there are some aspects of this connecting that I find instructive in terms of what they suggest about learning and teaching online. In this post I will cover what I see as three aspects: layering, negotiation, and distribution. To clarify, I believe that all these aspects apply to face-to-face learning contexts as well. What I am specifically interested in here is how they manifest in a different modality.

I noticed that we eased into the course through a “slow-release” process, with information being transmitted in chunks. While some of it does seem overwhelming, the method of repeating the content and instructions in various ways and modes, through a variety of channels, making references to past iterations as well as anticipating where we will go with the module – this method which I will call layering seems designed to deal with the overwhelm. Synchronous communication and physical presence may still necessitate some layering, but I don’t think it requires it to the same extent. I do wonder though whether there may be such a thing as too much layering. Is there a point beyond which there are diminishing marginal returns, when the cognitive load becomes onerous? Does anticipating that learners will have trouble with the material, and designing pre-preemptive interventions to address that anticipation, in fact convey to learners the illusion that the material is more complicated that it is? I suppose it is hard to know where that sweet spot is.

The second aspect relates to the human connection – the relationality that lies at the core of any learning community, but which has to be established in a different way when that community is online. There is a great deal of negotiation that seems to be necessary, as people dip in and out of this community, feel different degrees of commitment to it, bring different values, experiences, languages, cultures… Ostensibly simple things like deciding who takes notes, when to meet, how to complete a presentation, these things require explicit and sometimes tedious negotiation. Tedious, that is, until it becomes normalized. At the beginning of the course, the level of negotiation required is higher perhaps until routines get established. There were some things that were decided for us – what the introductory presentation would look like, for example. At first I wondered why a template had been designed. Surely as an introduction to the negotiation process, putting together that first presentation would have been a good way to ease into the process of collaboration. But perhaps part of the early negotiation is buy-in. At the start of the course, we do not have a sense of how much each group member is prepared to do, and the show must go on!

Finally, I am struck by the spreading of our digital footprint across so many platforms. We have google drive, whatsapp, zoom, wordpress, and I am sure there will be a few more before the course ends. Online learning is something we cannot avoid in the higher education domain, but I wonder whether this distribution of our learning across multiple platforms and spaces, rather than in one consolidated virtual learning environment, helps rather than hinders the building of community. I wonder also if this sort of displacement of content requires more critical attention. One of my PBL group members stated in the google sheet where we were supposed to record our contact details that he wasn’t comfortable entering so much personal information there. That struck me as a valid position to hold, and I think that this little act of resistance is important in online learning – where our content and our identities get distributed is perhaps an issue we could negotiate with our students.

I realize that I have said nothing about problem-based learning or fish, but perhaps that will come up in another reflection. For this week my thoughts have centered on my entry into this space as a learner, from which vantage point I have noticed that starting an online learning community involves layering of modes of information to ease learners into the space, negotiation with and among learners regarding work processes and relationships, and the distribution of content and identity across multiple platforms.