iced 2014 round table presentation by lars uhlin and maria kvarnström
DESCRIPTION
Round table presentation "Offering a continuing professional development course for teachers in higher education (HE) by using an open course as the frame", presented at ICED 2014 by Lars Uhlin and Maria Kvarnström. The seminar aimed to share and discuss experiences from using existing open courses for specific continual professional development purposes for teachers within Higher Education institutions. Findings are that the open learning environment collaboration with colleagues from other countries can give new dimensions to teachers professional development.TRANSCRIPT
Offering a continuing professional development course for teachers in highereducation (HE) by using an open course as the frame
Lars Uhlin and Maria Kvarnström
Unit for Medical Education, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
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Background
Courses for HE teachers are often “locked in” into universities own systems and are often discipline and context specific
An increasing “market” of open courses online MOOCs and other kinds of open courses courses about different aspects of teaching and learning some of them contain nicely packaged and produced content and
open educational resources A high dropout rate
lack of interaction and collaborative learning might be one reason can we add interaction to the learning experience of an open
course?
These things inspired us to create and use an open course as the frame for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for teachers at our University.
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The open FDOL (Flexibel Distance Online Learning)
Served as the frame for the institutional course at Karolinska
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The open FDOL (Flexibel Distance Online Learning)
Community space designed for optional participation
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The open FDOL (Flexibel Distance Online Learning)
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The FDOL as an institutinal course
The outline and content of the open FDOL course was used with only minor changes
The participants studied in PBL groups with learners from across the world as part of the open course.
A course description, including criteria for passing the course, was developed.
Content estimated to correspond to either five or two weeks of studies depending on the degree of participation.
Certificates of Higher education pedagogy were accredited.
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“I must say, the FDOL course I’m taking now really gives most of the control to the learners, and I’ve appreciated that quite a lot (although it is quite challenging)”
“Learning is where people are. We need to sharpen tools and course design to meet a new world. This course showed me ways, and left me eager to learn more”
“I have realised how important socialization is for the collaboration and that collaborations doesn’t just happen. This I will work with and be more supportive with”
“This FDOL141 course was the best continuous professional development I have had for many years! “
“It feels like that community buzz has been created amongst colleagues in this course, but across geographical boundaries”
“Being forced to reflect on topics in a blog makes you learn the topic and makes it easy to get back to what you learnt“
“Flexibility in time makes it possible when working and having much to do at home with children“
“I realized the potential power in FDOL tools and techniques. To explore the benefits and challenges of openness in education“
Participant voices
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Findings and conclusions
Collaboration with colleagues from other countries in an open learning environment can give new dimensions to Continuing Professional Development.
We believe that there is a high potential in opening up the practice of CPD for teachers in Higher Education and there are many ways how to use existing open courses.
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Some things that we would like to explore further together with you:
• possibilities of using open courses for institutional accreditation in your contexts?!
• can we (should we) open up our existing intitutional courses?
• can we collaborate more having common courses across borders?
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Future perspectives Search for other existing open courses to “use” and
continue to develop how to use in a way that is beneficial for learning.
An new open international course – Open Networked Learning – is developed in collaboration with colleagues in Lund and will serve as both an open course and institutional courses for KI and Lund University respectively (and others??)
opennetworkedlearning.wordpress.com
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Thanks for your attention
Lars Uhlin
@laruhl
Maria Kvarnström
@mariakvarnstrom
Unit for Medical Eduation / Centre for Learning and Knowledge
Karolinska Institutet
Lars Uhlin & Maria Kvarnström