Flexible Learning Environment Reflection Paper

Flexible Learning Environment reflection paper
As you may have noticed, during the fall I participated in the online course FDOL
(flexible, distance and online learning), and now it is time to make my final
reflections on what I have learned during the course.
What I’ve learned about flexible, distance and online learning
The FDOL course in itself was a great learning experience, not only by providing
theoretical knowledge and interesting discussions on what flexible and online
learning is, but also by giving practical experience of participating in such a
course. It was inspiring, challenging and gave me lots of ideas for how to
incorporate online tools in my own teaching. But, to keep things short in this final
reflection, I choose to focus on the three key concepts in the course title; flexible,
distance, and online learning.
Flexibility – the concept of flexibility is something we have discussed a lot during

the course, and one statement that stayed with me is “Flexible for whom?”.
Flexibility for students may very well lead to more work for both teachers and
administrators, and while flexibility is often thought of as a good thing, too much
flexibility can also leave students without the support needed to reach their
intended learning outcomes. A balance between self-directed and flexible
learning and structure and support is needed.
Distance – the distance is of course one aspect of flexibility, by not having to be

present in a physical location education in different forms can be accessible to a
much larger group of people. Not only can the education be accessed, but as a
participant you also have the opportunity to collaborate and share experiences
with people from all over the world. On the other hand, the geographical distance
can cause problems with respect to e.g. time differences making synchronous
communication challenging.
Online – the fact that we are discussing online learning opens up to using an array
of new tools for teaching and learning! In the FDOL course we have used blogs,
twitter, google+ (with both groups and hangouts), diigo for curating resources and
adobe connect for online seminars. Most tools where familiar to me, but the
sheer amount of different platforms and means of communicating in the course
felt quite overwhelming to me the first weeks. This led to many interesting
discussions and thoughts about digital literacy, and what it might be like for
students to be faced with many new and perhaps intimidating technical
environments.
Finally, one of the key lessons I’ve learned during the FDOL course has to do with
the importance of supporting students while at the same time trusting them to be
independent and self-guided learners.
What I learned from working in an online PBL group
PBL (problem based learning) was quite new for me, and it took a bit getting used
to. I have often worked with group assignments during my own education, and
am fond of using group work in my own teaching – but of a much more traditional
kind. Here we were given quite free hands – we got to set our own learning
outcomes for each unit, and choose which scenarios to work with, and how to
present our results. But basically, it was all about collaborative learning [1]- and
after a while we managed! I quite like the scale suggested by Siemens to discuss
collaborative learning, describing how learner-learner interactions in an e-
learning course can be viewed as a four stage continuum [2]:
Communication (people talking, discussing)
Collaboration (sharing ideas and working together, occasionally sharing resources,

in a loose environment)
Cooperation (doing things together, but each with his or her own purpose)
Community (striving for a common purpose)
I believe that during the FDOL-course I experienced at least the first three stages.
Communication took place e.g. in the online seminars where participants from
the entire course participated and synchronously discussed the units topic. We
also did some sharing of resources and ideas in google+, bordering on
collaboration. In the PBL group we definitely collaborated, but it took a while for
us to reach cooperation. At first we had weekly hangouts where we discussed
what to do and then attempted to work independently and have asynchronous
discussions in our google+ group. It didn’t work very well. Working together using
the google hangouts turned out to be very efficient in the latter part of the
course. We had our shared documents on google docs and all worked together on
them while we simultaneously discussed in the hangout. Between hangouts we all
worked separately, but the main task of collaborative learning was done
synchronously in the hangouts. I have previous experience of similar work when
writing articles together with other researchers spread out across Sweden. I
would definitely recommend this way of working to my future students, at times
its even more efficient than meeting f-2-f since everyone can work on the same
document at the same time.In the end, I think the three of us left in the group
actually felt a sense of community too.
What I plan to change in my own teaching
As I’ve described in earlier blog posts, I plan to extend my teaching practice by

including blogging as a tool for students to reflect and communicate with experts
outside the teaching environment, and potentially also explore flipping my
classroom to some extent in order to make better use of the face-to-face
teaching-learning activities.
In the FDOL course, we have discussed open learning a lot – how can we open up
our practice? I find the thought of open education very appealing, and I believe
there is a great demand for the type of courses we teach in health informatics
masters program. Hilton et al showed that using current technology it is quite
easy to make a course openly accessible to outside students [3], and I believe that
I could easily make most of my course materials openly available online (since
most of it is already published on our online learning platform). Yet, considering
my experiences with the FDOL course, I question somewhat the benefit to
learners in only accessing these materials. The main learning activities that take
place in my courses are of a collaborative nature, and in order to organize
functioning groups I still believe some direction and facilitation from teachers is
required. Simpson also focus on motivation as a key aspect of online learning [4],
and I believe that both peer feedback and meaningful activities can increase
student motivation – but it requires active interaction with teachers/facilitators as
well. In addition, opening up my courses requires much more planning and
organization than I currently have means to do. For now, I’ll keep my courses
blended with both online and face-to-face teaching/learning activities,
introducing more and more online tools and open practices such as blogging. And
perhaps it will be possible to offer some of the courses as fully online alternatives
in the future – I’ll keep you posted on what happens!

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Flexible Learning Environment reflection paper

What I’ve learned about flexible, distance and online learning

Flexibility – the concept of flexibility is something we have discussed a lot during

Distance – the distance is of course one aspect of flexibility, by not having to be

What I learned from working in an online PBL group

Collaboration (sharing ideas and working together, occasionally sharing resources,

Community (striving for a common purpose)

What I plan to change in my own teaching

As I’ve described in earlier blog posts, I plan to extend my teaching practice by

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