Tag: pedagogical practices

What do make online courses really effective (technological tools or pedagogical practices)?

  • Technological tools are great, but the pedagogical practices are even superior

  • Students are experiencing negative emotions five times more than positive emotions

The tools are great. What’s more important,though, is to understand what is like to be a student in such situation. Put yourself in your student’s shoes. For example, do you know that students are experiencing a heavy load of negative emotions in online learning environments. A study tracking students’ emotions while solving academic task found that they are experiencing 4.85 negative emotion to every single positive emotion occurrence!

Article  Emotions Among Students Engaging in Connectivist Learning Experiences

AlDahdouh, A. A. (2020). Emotions Among Students Engaging in Connectivist Learning Experiences. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(2), 98-117. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v21i2.4586

  • On-time interaction is the key to mitigate the negative emotions in online learning

  • Teacher’s content is just another small element in the Internet

That being the case, your role as a teacher is to warn your students and to try to mitigate the negative emotions by on-time interaction. The presence of content alone may not serve your students. Being responsive to their emerging demands will certainly do. In online learning context, your content is just another small element in the ocean of resources available to your students in the ever-expanding network.

  • Plagiarism cannot be controlled or predicted in online learning context

  • You need to be innovative to engage students in online courses

Teacher should also understand that students will most likely find the easiest way to get their job done. You will not be able to control or even predict their behaviors. In our previous experiment, we gave the students a PDF file containing a very short (self-developed) story. A considerable part of the story was covered with a black circle though.story-with a hole

The task was to be creative and to recover the missing parts of the story. What was then was that our students searched the Internet for the story to no avail. Instead of sitting and writing down the missing parts by their own, they searched the Internet again to remove the black circle from the PDF. And guess what, one student succeeded to remove the circle and handed out the story to us in full!

Article  Individual Learning Experience in Connectivist Environment: A Qualitative Sequence Analysis

AlDahdouh, A.A. (2019). Individual learning experience in connectivist environment: A qualitative sequence analysis. International Journal of Research in Education and Science (IJRES), 5(2), 488-509. Retrieved from https://www.ijres.net/index.php/ijres/article/view/536

The idea is that, you need to adopt new pedagogical practices to engage students in open learning environment. The pedagogical practices not the tools are that matters.

Keywords:

  • Online learning

  • Technological tools

  • Pedagogical practices

  • Online course

  • e-learning

  • Connectivism

  • Internet

  • Networked learning

  • Plagiarism

  • Students

  • Interaction

  • Education

  • Higher education