Seeking the Holy Grail in learners' engagement

  In my teacher experience I have had the luck of experimenting Online Learning design well before the COVID-19 emergency hit the whole education world. In particular, I have been creator and organiser of a distance course for professionals. In that context I had 1 year time frame to design a course, its contents, and ways of delivery and examination. Together with other colleagues, we learned about the importance of keeping teaching videos short, partitioning adequately the material and giving a good structure to the contents to help students. In other words, we followed several recommendations that can be commonly found in pedagogical research on distance learning [1]. We also tried to create learning communities by promoting virtual forums and discussions, however those opportunities have never been taken into account by the students. My personal opinion on this was that, due to the type of students, i.e. professionals that follow a course in their spare time, being part of a learni

  After more than a month through the course on Open Networked Learning (ONL), the webinar on Learning Communities [1] and some of the suggested literature for the topic [2, 3] stimulated some reflections on courses organisation and current (frustrating) experiences with students and group assignments. These reflections start from my own experience with this ONL course: me, and with many of the members in my group (and so I guess it happened also for other groups), felt kind of disoriented with respect to the assignments and the way of working. We have been given some problem/context to work on, but apart from that we have been given freedom to self-organise and decide on what to concretely investigate. My personal opinion is that even ourselves, the teachers, are kind of unused to this type of advanced collaboration: not a simple cooperative work, where everyone is assigned a specific task, rather a real collaborative effort, where everyone contributes to the construction of group kno

 I am part of the generation that fully experimented the transition into the Web era: from the primordial telephone-line based connections towards more and more bandwidth capable connections, until nowadays data connections available even on mobile devices. Since the beginning, the Web was perceived as a place of freedom, mainly because of the free-of-charge sharing of contents. However, this virtual business model started to be unsustainable as soon as it impacted the real world business (just take as example all the entertainment market, i.e. tv, music, and movies). As a consequence, content providers had to find a way to charge virtual consumers when these ones became the majority of all the customers. Image taken somewhere on the Web I wanted to start my reflections on openness in education with the previous historical premise since I see a lot of similarities between them, and indeed a lot of reflections about openness in education are inspired to what happened/happens with the W

Honestly, I have never taken into account Facebook as a potential tool for teaching and learning. I would never recommend to be friend with your students, and vice versa would never expect that students' would be friends with their teachers. Simply put, there are too many private aspects that it is good to keep separated between students and teachers. With my great surprise, I instead discovered a rich literature on the topic: it is at least 10 years that there exist empirical observations on the adoption and effects of Facebook in teaching and learning activities [1]. In particular, the typical way of working is to create groups for a course: with the right settings, group members are only students, possibly together with teachers, without the need of being friends on Facebook [2]. This indeed is a reasonable approach, that alleviates a lot of the doubts related to privacy, both for the teacher and the students: in fact, a group creates a kind of private island on Facebook where

  I am participating to a course on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with the intent of finding new ways of motivating students to engage in their learning process. Here, for students I mean the more general category of people that commit to some training endeavour, including both academy and industry. As a matter of fact, a quite widespread problem with training is keeping students engaged in pursuing their studies. This is not a recent issue, it is enough to consider that many of the teaching and learning theories about learning styles have been investigated as a need of understanding why some students performed much better that others, regardless the topic and/or the teacher. (Image found somewhere on the web) I started reflecting more on my personal experiences as a "student", my driving motivations and faced difficulties affecting my engagement. One conclusion I can surely make is that the engagement has effectively worked each time I was the donkey in the middle of the figu