Final Entry Section 2.

At the end of Section 2, I feel much better about both: the structure and content of the course. Finally I have mustered the navigation tools and grasped the relationship between the discussions and individual tasks. I still feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of readings and a number of the written individual responses which are required for our portfolio. During Section 2, the most valuable finding for me was the realisation that the psychosocial methods and the quantitative outlook can co-exist without guilt and even complement each other (Atherton 2005; Biggs 1994). My previous view of the UEL teaching philosophy was that it was rather quantitative orientated, and in that sense I differed from other participants who could appreciate the qualitative methods promoted by the Institution. Yet for me, all those methods were underpinned by the qualitative measures aimed at the table league winning and increasing the students’ numbers. Yet I have changed my point of view due to the discussion we had and the readings I had gone through (particularly Biggs 1994 and Ramsden 1992). I can see now that the quantitative beahavioural approach can be as much applicable in teaching as the qualitative social constructivist approach. They can complement each other, but in my practice I want to promote mainly the qualitative dialogical mode which would “disrupt” the framework of a traditional lecture session and motivate the students to participate actively in the process of producing knowledge together. This attitude is possible even if the Institutional policy does not allow us to give up grades or exams. Before I learned about Laurillard’s “Conversational Theory”, I had been doing it for some time by applying a phenomenological theory of dialogue from Hans Gadamer and through the inspiration from Michail Bakchtin and his theory of the polyphonic dialogue. The challenge I have faced through this course is how to relate the issue of the dialogue to the design of the online content. As the next step leading me to the design of my individual project, I want to broaden my knowledge on this problem: I am going to refer to Derek Rowntree’s Success factors in material-based learning, aimed at the print material, and the infoKit (on the JISC infoNet website) aimed at the VLE opportunities. When designing our own projects, it is important to remember what Marton proved in his research, that “students differed in the way the related to the information they read (deep versus surface understanding)” and how they tried to organise their learning (holistic/atomistic)” (section on Phenomenonography). Since the brain works so differently and unpredictably, it is difficult to generate one ideal prototype of the course for everyone. I have realised that, for example, “ With the mature learner, the accomodation/assimilation approach (Donaldson 1984) can stimulate better effects than the more chaotic, interpretative approach (Biggs 1994) . I agree with Eva who pinpointed her need to organise her work in sequences and chunks, otherwise she would not be able to understand and apply the course material. Some learners (at least Gosia, Eva and myself) tend to print and sort the materials in a chronological order and relate it to the aims and objectives of the course. I want to take it into account when designing my own online project which should be grounded on adragogy (M.Knowles 1984) and lateral thinking (De Bono 1991). These two approaches not only allow the learner to apply their own individual style of learning, but they also develop deep understanding and permit a scope of mistakes as part of the learning process. As Knowles states, “Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for leaning activities”. I know from my own experience that the fear of the mistake with technology can be very constraining and thus should be “embedded” into the online course (e.g. a trial task before the proper assessment). What can help to establish the best manner of the delivery of the content is the VARK test, if it could be applied before the design of the course, or if the content could be adjusted to the VARK features of the learners. I have found out from other course participants that they appreciate, like myself, the kinaesthetic mode and I want to do more research now on how to “translate” ” the kinaesthetic mode into the representations of the online content. Nomen omen, I found out in the ETM402 guidelines that we can ask for help an expert in creating online content who, in fact, would be sub-hired by the University to share with us a certain amount of his/her knowledge. Selling knowledge in chunks by "sage on the stage" can be a blessing sometimes!