Reflection on Online Teaching and Learning Development Day 09/05/2019 #GMITMATL
On the 9th May 2019, GMIT TEL Network organised an Online Teaching and Learning Development Day whose title was “Developing confidence in designing, teaching and assessing for online and blended learning”. Although this development day was not a mandatory as part of my Teaching and Learning Certificate, I decided to participate anyway, and I am glad I did so.
Although I was not able to physically attend the training day, I used the Adobe Creative platform available in GMIT to be part of this training day.
From all the presentations I saw throughout the day, the two that were most relevant to me where provided by Dr Simon Thomson and Dr Orna Farrell.
Dr Simon Thomson’s talk was about ‘Repurposing the “Human-Factor“ for blended learning’ and it was very interesting to see his research on using blended learning and how face to face interactions are most critical for student success. Regarding student success, Dr Simon, shared a padlet poster where it is possible to see the different opinions of participants, as well as the debate created by other users interaction with the opinions provided.
It was also very interesting to see the video on Education 4.0 that was shared in his presentation, where the future of education through advanced technology is addressed. The video and the talk address how future can be shaped through education and what are the efforts to advance alongside with the future technical and digital needs. Dr Simon also explained the need of using a TPACK framework to digitally embedded academic development.
The talk from Dr Orna, addressed the need of blended learning (flipped classroom, hybrid aids) as an interaction between face-to-face lectures and fully online courses. The rationale behind this is the massification of higher education, and how the number of students in universities and IT’s is increasing worldwide. At the same time, there has been an increase in online courses such as Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOC) and other courses that are an alternative to attending a traditional course.
The talk from Dr Orna explores the vantages and advantages of online education, exploring different social perspectives, and stressed the importance of a mix between face-to-face and blended learning to engage students in the classroom and outside of the traditional lecture space, focusing on student success.
She stressed the importance of e-portfolios, so that the student can foster a sense of belonging to a community and collaborate with their peers and promote critical thinking. For more about her lecture, click on the link provided above, so that you can go through the slides.
Today’s training day was a very valuable learning opportunity for me, as it provided me more tools and resources to use within my teaching and learning facilitation path.
Thanks to the TEL Network for organising this event.
Online resources and references:
Education 4.0 - transforming the future of education (through advanced technology)
The Future is online (powerpoint presentation) by Dr Orna Farrell
Photo credits:
https://unsplash.com/photos/ViEBSoZH6M4
https://unsplash.com/photos/zeH-ljawHtg