Learning about learning

the ONL161 course, Part 2

We finished our first assignment in the PBL-group. The topic was how to get a student to engage in an online course, which is basically what we are trying to achieve within our own group. It is difficult of course, when we all have other commitments. Hence we split the work between us and agreed that everybody should make two slides and email to me. Well before the deadline I got one presentation with five slides, one with two slides, and one word document. It took some time to merge it all into a coherent presentation and I had to go through the material properly and learned a lot from it.

I posted the end-product in our group and my fellow students seemed pleased with the result and thanked me for finishing our task. There was no discussion on the conclusions we had drawn in our respective part of the project and no comments about what I could have done better when putting it together. And that made me think about how we focused more on the result, than the topic itself or the learning process. I think that means we still haven’t moved into the south-east corner of a student controlled, open-ended/strategic course. But at least I have learned what that is.