Learning in communities: do our students know how it works?

 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 knowledge. In this respect, it took some meetings and work iterations before we got accustomed to this way of working. At the same time, we started also noticing the benefits of being part of a learning community. Just to mention my personal case, the other members of the group introduced to me teaching approaches and tools that I did not know before, and that probably I would have never discovered on my own.

Picture taken somewhere on the web

Based on the reflections mentioned so far, I looked at my past experiences with group work and students' behaviour. As a matter of facts, very often group assignments are avoided since it is easy for less active students to "hide" in the overall work. However, as we learned in the ONL course, an appropriate design of group assignments reduces the chances of inactive students, since the contribute of everyone is valuable and necessary for the group to accomplish the given task. In turn, an increased involvement of students in their learning communities can promote their engagement in the studies. Very often, I am convinced that the majority of the students would have been able to pass a course without any issues if they just put that essential initial effort to let their learning process to start. 

As conclusion for these reflections, I have been thinking that maybe our students would need preliminary education on working in a learning community, in a similar way we teach them to write scientific documents, to use research methods, and so forth. Indeed, as K. Oddone remarks in her talk, students need to be made aware about how to opportunely access the overwhelming amount of information available nowadays and how to appropriately use a learning network to achieve their education objectives.

1. K. Oddone (2021). Webinar on learning in communities. https://play.lnu.se/media/t/0_pdkidza4

2. Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).

3. Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London.