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To end this learning diary, a few comments on the course.
My initial motivation in following the course was to learn more about SEA and to work in a slightly more structured manner. However, while following the lectures and doing the learning diary exercise my motivation changed somewhat in that seeing things from a student’s perspective I learnt a lot about this kind of virtual learning platform based course that might be useful in my work as a teacher.
Firstly, the issue of why I did the learning diary exercise (and became annoyed that I will be unable to write the essay paper). My decision to write the diary was based on my view of study; I feel it is the responsibility of students to contribute courses and not just take notes from a lecturer and then leave. All students, regardless of how inexperienced they might be in the field, can contribute to discussion, can help their fellow students’ learning, and can provide the teacher with insights.
Next a few comments on the form of the course and some ideas that might help in its development.
Tasks
The fact that the course is done without much contact with the teacher means there is little opportunity for negotiation of the tasks to be done. Consequently, the instructions need to be more detailed than in a classroom situation. I was, and to a certain extent still am, unsure of what precisely a learning diary is. Future students could be helped by having access to teacher-annotated examples, perhaps taken from this year’s course, to see what a learning diary should look like.
Format of tasks
To help students I would suggest that it be made explicit that the parts of the learning diary should be one file only and not one file per lecture. My experience is that it also helps if students are given a clear format for how they should name their files. Something like; “contempsea_Part_1_(Family Name)” so if a student is called Timo Virtanen, he would name the first part of his learning diary “contempsea_Part_1_Virtanen”. The question of whether students are allowed to use fields (header/footer) in the file should be made clear. These are small matters but help reduce student angst.
Timing
Doing the course as a student made me realise how important timing of tasks is. The small technical problems with the server meant that I fell behind the work and was left with a feeling of always trying to catch up. This may be because I am not a full-time student and have lots of other commitments, but I suspect others might have encountered similar feelings. Another thing I noticed is the need for time to think before writing the learning diary entry, especially since I did not want to merely repeat what the lecturer had said.
Lectures
It was evident from the lectures that the lecturers were knowledgeable in their field. My criticism would be that the lectures were sometimes too PowerPoint based. This meant that the lecture became too information-dense for spoken discourse.
The lectures in Helsinki were delivered from a sitting position to allow the speaker to remain on camera. From a teacher’s point of view this is a problem as it removes an important element of presentation technique; the use of space.
I would be interested to know how the fact that the lectures were available electronically affected attendance in Helsinki. Also of interest would be to know how many students were physically present in the classroom, how many students started the course, how many dropped out, and what reasons were given for not completing the course.
The discussion and questions at the end of the lectures were not on the film, which was unfortunate as they might have been quite interesting. Lecturers should also be reminded that any questions from the audience cannot be picked up by the microphone and they should thus paraphrase the question for the non-Helsinki students before answering.
Community
The greatest weakness of the course was the lack of a learning community. A course should include teacher-to-student, student-to-student, and student-to-teacher information transfer and feedback. The course participants seemed to have a variety of backgrounds, based on the profiles some of them provided, and might have had interesting and contrasting viewpoints. Students generally feel it is important to know where they stand relative to other students – feedback, be it other students’ comments or comments from the teacher, answers the vital questions; what seems right about my ideas, what seems wrong about my ideas, and what should I do next?
Building such interaction into a course like this is not easy. Virtual learning platforms have message board functions but message boards only really work if there is a small group of people who already know each other well. Otherwise they tend to be dominated by a very small number of users and others just ignore them. Individual feedback from the teacher on each lecture entry would be nice but in view of the group sizes in Finnish universities is not very practical as it is likely to overload the teacher. (For which reason, many thanks for taking the time to comment on my proposal for an essay likely to remain unwritten.)
A possibility might be to arrange some kind of discussion group in universities where there are more than a handful of students following the course. There are, I believe, coordinators in many universities who could possibly take the role of discussion facilitator. This idea might seem a little alien to the Finnish university system where a lot of the learning appears to be of the listen, take notes, and then answer the questions style.
I don’t know how a sense of learning community could be fostered, but the effect of group dynamics on learning and motivation should not be overlooked.
To conclude, I enjoyed the course and thank you for the opportunity to take part.
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