Seeking the Holy Grail in learners' engagement

  When I registered for this course and expressed my expectations, I wrote that I was seeking for the holy grail of students' engagement. Moreover, in an internal workshop at my university (Mälardalen University, MDU), I told that my impression about ONL was about a meta-course, that is a course that teaches you about course design through a course. Now that we reached the end I can say that my expectations have been fulfilled, even though not in the way I was expecting. Indeed, I believe to have gotten at least a clearer picture and a plan about a possible way to engage more students in their learning process. In my opinion, the mean is learning communities: if I manage to create adequate learning communities and convince the students to actively contribute in their communities, this will on one hand engage everyone more in learning, and will also make course contents more interesting for the students. When it comes to the meta-course expectation, indeed ONL has been a meta-course

  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