Sharing the learnings

The 3rd Symposium, Helsinki and Espoo, December 3rd-4th 2024

Presentations

On day one the project partners met with Kurkuli Online School, who presented both the school and a brief overview of the history of online education in Finland, but also a project on how they used their expertise on mobile and culture sensitive learning design to teach girls in Afghanistan.

The project also met up with the Finnish eLearning Center to network and share the latest news and questions.

Workshop with online teachers

Day two was a joint presentation-workshop with online teachers at Omnia, two of whom have been interviewed in our case studies.

The project partners presented what have been learnt in the project so far. A preliminary report is written (however still in Danish) and the findings were shared, followed by discussions on challenges, opportunities and good practice in online education.

Feedback session

As the project will result in a final online publication, the second part of the workshop was a aimed at getting feedback from the teachers on what structure, format and layout will be best suited to support them in their planning and execution of online teaching and learning.

Fairy tales and the imagination of no limits

Nordic Conference, Copenhagen, May 30th 2024

The project had two sessions in the Nordic Conference «AI, Humans & Learning«; a presentation and a workshop.

Reaching for the sky…

In the presentation, «Digitization -Is the Sky the Limit?», Hróbjartur Árnason used the Tower of Babel to explore how far human learning can go with digitally supported learning opportunities. His five pillars of learning are:

1. Learning environment (which can be the LMS in 100% online learning)
2. Guidance (even with all the advanced learning technology we use, teachers are no less important)
3. Curriculum (the content of the course)
4. Fellow travellers (social learning -how can we learn together in online learning?)
5. Dicipline (which is closely connected with the importance of structure often mentioned in the interviews)

Once upon a time…

In the workshop we tried out what we believe is an innovative new approach: Four cases from the project were rewritten as fairy tales, with the educator as a protagonist. The groups read their fairy tale and were given four questions for discussion and reflection:

• What kind of understanding arises here?
• What does the story tell you about learning?
• What does the story tell you about online learning?

And finally we asked the groups what they thought about this method.

Why did we do this? Believe it or not, we did it to estrange ourselves and the attendees. We who work in the field of online education are so used to read cases such as our own that we don’t se the forest for the trees. By reframing the stories, we wanted the attendees to discuss learning from a fresh point of view.

The fairy tales were interesting starting points for the discussion, but also very demanding. Participants experienced a closer relationship to the case because they had to decode and analyze the text. The mental schemas of the ancient fairy tale world and modern digital education created a cognitive dissonance that can spark learning when the participants are motivated, but this can also end up in frustration.

A warm welcome to a cold city

First symposium, Oslo, January 5th 2024

In the start up Symposium Karense Foslien (Norwegian Teaching) and Susanne Koch (Lovisenberg Diakonale Høyskole), representing Norwegian cases, presented to the project team and guests. The presentation were followed by an informal round table discussion.

Niels Henrik Helms also tried out summarizing the presentations and discussions in drawing, as done in some larger conferences.