It is that time of the year again…

During the next couple of days I’ll be attending Online Educa Berlin for the third year running and you may feel entitled to ask: Have the previous two years had any impact on my day-to-day work?

Good question. It is probably most fair to say that there have been no large-scale revolutions but that Clive Shepherd’s discussion of different ways to “blend” specific elements of learning continues to be a useful model for my planning of courses. Partly by accident, partly by design, I have begun experimenting with recorded instructions and presentations, specifically in a course module where I will be teaching and supervising student groups making interviews with marginalised citizens. The e-learning format seemed an obvious vehicle for instructing students about their assingment and techniques for preparing and analyzing interviews while using the face-to-face time for tutoring and supervision. As the course module has only just started, I won’t be able to evaluate and comment on the experiment before January. But I still think that last year’s workshop gave me the tools needed to conceptualise the different ways of organising the preparation, instruction and application of skills-oriented teaching and learning.

I guess that another lesson which I have learned is that planning and implementing a fundamental revision of a study programme is likely to be doomed because of the complexity of a cross-disciplinary programme. Doing small-scale experiments is a much more viable strategy.

How about this year’s OEB, then? I found it a bit difficult to select a relevant pre-conference workshop but in the end I opted for a workshop about e-learning, content platforms and mobile experience. Most students – and teachers – in HE are familiar with mobile devices and we could argue that the mobile interface is already our main interface with the WWW but we are still some way away from integrating this experience in the design of LMEs and teaching materials.

Another theme that I will try to follow is a series of presentations on the first day of the conference which focus on the role of students in producing learning content and structuring learning. This also fits with a project I will be contributing to during 2017 concerning the implementation of the “study activity model” in Danish professional BA-programmes with a specific focus on blended learning. I will try a write more about this later in the week. As a follow-up I consider attending a number of presentations focussing on students “owning” or “controlling” their learning environment – even though my plans are still open for revision.