Topic 5 Lesson learnt – future practice

Here we are, eleven weeks and five topics later I’m writing my final blogpost, at least within the ONL202 course. Who knows, maybe I’ll keep going with the blog and having it as some sort of diary for future endeavors in online education. In this last post I’ll use the questions posted on the topic-page in my reflection.

What are the most important things that you have learnt through your engagement in the ONL course? Why?

There are many things I’ve had to form an opinion on and assimilate since the start of this course. From my (actual) digital literacy, how I feel about the size and contents of my digital footprint to actively reflecting on how I feel, think and act in the roles of student, teacher and facilitator in an online environment.
The single most important thing that I’ve learnt during this course is the importance of social and emotional interaction between teacher and student but also student – student, especially in an online environment. This became evident after Topic 2 and 3 where we as a group made the leap from stage 2 (counter-dependency & fight) to stage 4 (work & productivity) according to Susan Wheelans 4 stages of group progress. It´s not like we had fights or big disagreements but during Topic 1 and especially Topic 2 I didn’t enjoy the meetings and I had to force myself to try to take a somewhat active roll which is a hard thing for me to do in many situations. In an unknown group situation and especially if the goals (in ONL, the Topics) are vague, I need to have time to observe and reflect before I feel comfortable in “taking a step forward”. Sometime around when we started working with topic 3 the mood changed, we started to talk to each other as friends and in a more open way, not just about the topic, what was on the news, our jobs but also about private things, how we felt about things and family issues etc. Since then I’ve been looking forward to the group meetings and I think the work we did after that, especially during topic 3 was really, really good.

How will your learning influence your practice?/ What are you going to do as a result of your involvement in ONL?

Right now several of us at the school of music in Piteå are in the middle of developing/migrating parts of our regular programs and several existing courses into online courses. The ONL course together with parts of the development program I’m participating in has so far been very inspirational and contributory in the development of these programs/courses so one could say that it’s already underway regarding influencing.

What are your thoughts about using technology to enhance learning/teaching in your own context?

This hasn’t changed. In my field you have to be (or at least try to be) friends with technology, whether it’s hardware or software. Like I wrote in my last blogpost, in the future I will think twice about blaming technology (“wrong platform, bad software etc.”) for badly designed courses and course-elements, or just using the wrong technology for the task(s) at hand.

Postlude (or perhaps interlude)

In my very first post I wrote: “In writing this blog I’m going to try something different to what I would normally do which is: I’m going to try to ”let the words flow” and edit as little as possible. When I’m writing to a student, a colleague, for a project and so on I am always second guessing myself and seem to dissect sentences far too long so that what I write almost always becomes (in my eyes) as correct as it can get, but a bit boring and uninspiring”

Reading through all of my blogposts and thinking about the process of writing them (or should it say “typing”?) I still don’t think my writing is as “flowing” as I would like it to be and yes, I’m still second guessing myself. ..But not nearly as much as I used to.

/Björn

References

Susan A. Wheelan (2005). Creating effective teams

Topic 4 Design for online and blended learning

In 2014 I decided together with a colleague to create an online-course aimed at strengthening active music teachers in their role as material-creators e.g. creating their own backingtracks and sheet music and also being able to record themselves and their students with a DAW (digital audio workstation). This was my first attempt at creating a course entirely online and although the course ran for three years with many applicants each year, we decided to shut it down. One of the reasons for this was student completion (or lack thereof). We discussed possible reasons for this for some time and then went on to other things, but have now due to Covid and the need for more online learning decided to give this course another go, only this time we will need to restructure everything, split it up into multiple courses and learn from our mistakes.
The “easy” explanations for our failure (yes, I see it as that) were in the beginning the software and the digital platforms: “Adobe connect is useless, Fronter won’t let students work with big files etc.” but the more I learn about networked learning, learning in communities, PBL, constructive alignment, community of inquiry etc., the more I realize we need to totally reconstruct our earlier attempts.

During Topic 4 While reading through In the Community of Inquiry Blended Learning Evaluation (Cleveland-Innes, M. & Wilton, D. (2018) I reflected over several of the statements in the evaluation and applied them to our earlier attempt at online courses. These stood out as aspects that were non-existent:

• My actions reinforce the development of a sense of community among course participants.
• I acknowledge emotion expressed by the students in my course.
• Students in my course are able to form distinct impressions of some other course participants.
• Students feel comfortable interacting with other course participants.
• Getting to know other course participants gives students a sense of belonging in my course.
• Emotion is expressed, online or face to face, among the students in my course.

Long story short, we had 80 students sitting by themselves with no contact between each other watching tutorial-videos made by us (most of which in a monotone and serious voice) and doing tasks independently and asynchronous. Zero sence of community and student engagement through emotional interaction.

This fall with everything I’ve participated in, from being a mentor in LTU:s Qualifying course for university teachers which is part of a development program (PNL), to participating in ONL-202 has inspired me and forced me to have a good look in the mirror regarding what I do and how I go about doing it. …like some sort of a reboot.

Resources

Cleveland-Innes, M. & Wilton, D. (2018). Guide to Blended Learning. Burnaby: Commonwealth of Learning. Appendix 1. p.74-77.

http://oasis.col.org/bitstream/handle/11599/3095/2018_Cleveland-Innes- Wilton_Guide-to-Blended-Learning.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Topic 3 Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning

Climbing the Tree and playing together

This topic on the ONL-page posed a question on how to get people to recognize the value of becoming part of a learning community and collaborate with their peers in a way that makes use of all the different competencies that group members bring into the work. After our meetings we decided that the question we were going to ask was: How do we get from cooperation to collaboration?

Our presentation developed into two metaphors, The Tree and the Improvisational band.

Regarding the band/music metaphor.

This spring due to the pandemic, I had to quickly figure out how to teach all of my ensembles-classes online instead of the usual synchronous rehearsals/classes. Like I wrote in our group-presentation, In music, whether you are a student or a working pop/rock/jazz -musician there are almost always collaborative elements involved. Different goals and styles of music call for different methods of combined effort. So, which types of combined effort are possible with todays technology? One thing is certain: If everything was perfect with regards to students having their instruments/microphones connected with fantastic sound online, a superfast connection, they were in the best mood of their lives, the birds were singing and the stars and planets were aligned….there is still one hurdle to overcome and that hurdle is latency. If the latency of sound between the students is more than around 10-20 milliseconds, it will be almost impossible for the students to play together in sync with each other. In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj6Ij1Oxe1s they present the problems associated with playing music together online and also calculate how much latency there would be if information travelled at the speed of light. They show that if two musicians, one in NYC and one in Hawaii tried to play music together the latency would be 52ms. Latency is the hurdle that stands in my way right now from trying synchronous ensemble-classes.

When preparing for meeting 2 in Topic 3 I read this and found it a good fit:
Student engagement through emotional interaction is directly related to academic success, whereas emotionally unresponsive learning environments affect academic performance (Reyes et al., 2012). Student-student emotional support embraced through interaction is necessary to build a sense of community leading to cooperation, commitment, individual accountability and satisfaction, which are requisites to collaborative learning (Kreijns et al., 2003; Zhan, 2008).
For students and musicians to be able to successfully collaborate, first and foremost they need to be able to feed of each other, they need to trust in each others abilities to contribute.

In the music part of the presentation we used two different scenarios:

Cooperation
An example of cooperation in music could be a recording-session in a studio environment where the musicians/students are handed sheet music, a producer calls the shots regarding the arrangement and the musicians record their parts to a clicktrack/metronome.
The different instruments can be (and in these types of situations often are) recorded separately, though the end result will be the fusion of the individual performances.

Collaboration
For collaboration to take place in an improvisational setting e.g. a Jazz-trio, the musicians choices and actions have to be intuitive. They need to connect musically and so they need to have knowledge about each others background, musical history, weak points/strong points, how they tend to phrase etc. but also about their different personalities.

There are of course many more ways to collaborate/cooperate in music, e.g. writing music together by playing and sharing ideas, passages, chords, parts, lyrics etc. to each other and making songs this way. That’s for another paper/presentation.

The end result for our PBL-group ended up according to me to be the most cooperative work we have done so far, and for me personally these two weeks got me thinking about how to better collaborate in different situations in my regular work. I recently stumbled across Susan A Wheelan´s “creating effective teams”. She divides the progress of a group into four stages:

1. Dependency & Inclusion
2. Counter-dependency & fight
3. Trust & structure
4. Work & productivity

When I look at what our PBL-group has achieved so far I think we are now somewhere in between stage 3 and 4 and I think it shows in our work. Stages 1 and 2 weren’t all that dramatic for us as a group but personally I had somewhat of a hard time during these topics. During the meetings i felt frustration about the content and speed of our work and I felt a bit anxious before each meeting. According to the study by Capdeferro & Romero (2012) the three biggest sources of frustration in collaborative learning experiences are commitment imbalance, unshared goals and communication difficulties. These three factors might have been amplified by the somewhat vague scenarios and the fact that we are a heterogeneous group. The results from topics 1 and 2 were ok, but when the group started to work on topic 3, something changed. Before the meetings we started to socialise in a different way, our discussions became more personal and we started to better listen to each other. We started to collaborate.

On towards Topic 4

Reference list

References:

Is it possible to play music together over the internet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj6Ij1Oxe1s

Reyes, M. R., Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., White, M., & Salovey, P. (2012). Classroom emotional climate, student engagement, and academic achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology

Karel Kreijns, Paul A. Kirschner, Wim Jochems (2003). Identifying the pitfalls for social interaction in computer-supported collaborative learning environments: a review of the research, Computers in Human Behavior

Susan A. Wheelan (2005). Creating effective teams

Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44

Topic 2 Open Learning – Sharing and Openness

The theme of this topic was to explore the benefits and challenges of openness in education and learning. In this post I focus on the challenges regarding my field.

I’ll start of by saying that I’ve never had a problem with the thought of sharing my created recourses (recorded seminars, playalongs, instruction-videos, written material) openly or with students and other teachers (others than the types of inconveniences which I will shortly mention). Watching the Ted Talks with Dr. David Wiley (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M) I agree with what he said about expertise being non rivalrous, that I can share knowledge without losing it and I also think Dr. Wiley makes a good point about not having to compete for access to digital media which is not the case for e.g. a book in a library. …but. Sometimes I might get a new student that has already had my material handed to them from other teachers for other purposes than what the material was intended for. For example a teacher who used to be a student of mine handed out material as a practice-playalong to his students before they came to University. The material was meant to be used by me as a prima vista- task (sightreading new material). This meant that I could no longer use my material for the intended purposes – I now had to construct new material for the same purpose.

Since I’m teaching various courses and subjects in music, most of which in groups/ensembles in which for learning to take place demand the students to make mistakes and try new things in the moment, recording and later sharing these kinds of ensemble-classes demand that the students can feel safe in their environment. We talked about this in our PBL-group and in these types of situations it is paramount that the teacher clarifies how and what parts of the material is going to be used e.g. maybe only the starting material, teacher feedback and end result will be openly shared. ….And talking about feedback, when sharing recourses you seldom share the most important recourse and aspect of teaching the arts which is feedback, both the feedback that the students get and give in class and the feedback they receive after the song/project/task is done.

Lastly I wanted to know what my collogues think about this so I interviewed two of them to get their views on sharing material/recourses as well as sharing classes/lectures/labs. This is how they (hopefully with nothing lost in translation) answered:

Sharing material/recourses

Teacher #1: “Online tutorials are great in some aspects but you lose the possibility of personal feedback. Certain material can mean different things to different students in where they are in their own development and here diverse feedback is crucial. There are reasons we have 1 to 1 classes in some courses. We often have to focus on the individual, then again certain material can work well in a shared masterclass format such as instrument-clinics”

Teacher #2: “Sharing material and recourses in itself is good thing but sometimes sharing material might feel like “shooting yourself in the foot”. For e.g. my course in synthprogramming, if I would share all material in the form of videos and online lectures some presumptive students might not feel the need to take the course, not seeing the value of the feedback given within the course.”

Sharing classes/lectures/labs:

Teacher #1: I think it can be quite different depending on the type of course, e.g. a lecture that is usually very ”one-way” it can definitely work. One has to consider the “silent knowledge” that is probably lost by not being in the room. In an ensemble class the material and the introduction to the material can be open and shared, as can the end result but the path to achieve the results where the students need to push themselves (and make mistakes in the process) is a very personal experience. Sharing e.g. an ensemble-class, certain parameters could be useful for the “third party onlooker” like technical and terminological elements, but I expect the “losses” for the people in the room participating would be considerable.”

Teacher #2: Sharing lectures and recourses is a good thing e.g. a lecture on a specific era in music can and maybe should be shared. An online ensemble-class where the students need to actively participate would be difficult and recording and documenting a class could hamper the students. On the other hand if the recording of an ensemble-class is edited and segments of the important feedback is shown, that could be beneficial for an onlooker. A recording could also benefit other teachers in seeing how you approach different subjects/situations.

Reference list:

Dr. David Wiley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M

Topic 1 Digital literacy

Topic 1 in the ONL-course covered online participation and digital literacy. The scenario we were asked to work with involved challenges of being new to online courses, about privacy, new tools and a fear of seeming stupid.

When I first read the scenario I thought that privacy was the most important thing we as a group could/should/would focus on. I thought that privacy online meant a lot to me (and others) in their digital life and in social media. After ”massaging” my thoughts on this it turns out it doesn’t mean any more or less to me than in my regular life. It seems to be about the same. More on this in a later blogpost.

One of our tasks was to watch films including one of two by David White of Oxford University (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be) where he discussed “visitors and residents” regarding the use of digital technology. If I use David Whites model my online persona seems to be mostly “visitor”. I use digital services mostly to learn new things, get information and to get inspiration. I seldom engage in discussions (especially personal) in forums, in social media or on a blog. In that sense according to Davids graph I am an extreme “visitor”. Maybe this will change as the course goes on, maybe not.

Some of the things I have thought about during this topic is preparation, facilitation and the importance of time before (digital)learning can occur, at least for me personally.

Preparation
Create workflows that are as smooth and unobtrusive as possible. The tools have to be intuitive. In my daily work, if the objective is e.g. to create a piece of recorded music, you try to make using the relevant tools/functions you need in ProTools or Cubase become second nature. The objective in my field is often not to learn every feature or function, it is to create something and learn in the process. Too many and complicated Tools (and ways to use these tools) can confuse instead of inspire and in turn kill creativity. If the objective is to create and write a blog, then spend some time on choosing, creating and setting it up. Then develop a workflow on how you interact with the blog. Give yourself time to do this.

Facilitation
You have to take into account the surroundings, the mindset and how you focus, for example: When I go to my “analogue” workplace I get into a different mindset, I set up my desk/classroom, I may speak to a colleague, I might meet and have a talk with students. Working from home I could take 10 steps from my breakfast to my computer and enter a meeting/class. This is not a good start at least for me. My preferred digital workplace is definitely also my physical workplace.
If I were to setup an online course at this moment I would try to find necessary and appropriate facilitation regarding platform and software -alternatives for digital collaboration depending on what it is I want to achieve. I would think about how I could remove the static from the experience. For example regarding future ONL-studies I ask myself why we aren’t using Teams or Canvas as a means of group-communication instead of a website+Zoom+Google docs+Twitter? (I’m not suggesting we should, just using it as an example). Using Teams may need a newly developed workflow for some students but so does the ONLwebsite. Do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (the time spent altering/creating workflows)?

More thoughts to come in the coming weeks.

Reference list

White, David: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be

Prelude

My name is Björn Hällis. I was born and raised in Jakobstad(Pietarsaari) in Finland and moved to Sweden in -98 to study music at LTU. I live in Piteå with my wife and three children. I’m currently working as a senior lecturer (or associate professor according to KTH) in music (ensemble, music production, history and instrument) at the School of Music at Luleå University of Technology located in Piteå in the north of Sweden.
At the moment I am taking part in a qualification programme and ONL is one of the parts contained within that programme.
I’ve been teaching since 2001 in different schools in the north of Sweden and since 2004 at the School of Music at Luleå University of Technology where I’ve worked full time since 2013. I have always filled my time with teaching so conducting research is an area I have yet to explore.

When I’m not working I spend my time with my family. Besides being involved in junior Hockey and being a rabid F1-follower I also have a big interest in aviation, everything from flight simulators to flying drones and I spend allot of time on aviation-channels on Youtube.

In writing this blog I’m going to try something different to what I would normally do which is: I’m going to try to ”let the words flow” and edit as little as possible. When I’m writing to a student, a colleague, for a project and so on I am always second guessing myself and seem to dissect sentences far to long so that what I write almost always becomes (in my eyes) as correct as it can get, but a bit boring and uninspiring. Here in this blog I’ll try to have another approach.

My first blog post

This post is a test for me to see what future posts will look like.

• testing this
• and this

Trying to post a picture:

and here is a picture