Development task

I´m going to plan a course about the sustainability as my development task. Sustainability is a wide concept, but I ask students to find out what would be the most sustainable way of living for them at the future. They should cover in their work some key areas including e.g. ecosystems, climate change, energy, agriculture, food and water. This course tries to find some answers how people can continue living sustainably in our world.

The main question of the course is for learners to solve: What would be the sustainable way of living for an individual? 

Students work in groups around the question. There will be several weeks time to solve the question. Groups will plan their work and agree what areas of the sustainability are covered. Possibly support from the teacher is needed in the planning phase. Groups will have their own online discussion forums where they can discuss and work together. Periodically (e.g. once a week) groups will write a diary (blog) about the work done and discussions around the topic. Writer of the diary changes every time so that each member of the group participates to writing. Other groups will then read and comment diary. If possible some blogs are replaced by f2f discussion meetings.

Teacher suggests a wide range of online resources for learner´s about the subject. There will be e.g. digital libraries, articles from magazines, interviews of experts, book chapters, videos, statistics and other web sites. Also experts working in this area will help students online. Also other resources defined by students can be used.

End product of the course will be an article which will be published in the school magazine. It will also be presented to other groups f2f or online, depending on the groups. Every group will write an article of their own, and the assessment will happen based on the article and group work (activities during the work). The assessment criteria has been agreed together before the work.

When planning the course, it´s important to consider the learning culture. It will form a basis to the whole learning process. It should be considered what kind of students there are in the course, what is their learning environment what will be their working environment at the future. It should be decided if the traditional teacher centered learning culture is enough to produce the learning students need or if the learning needs to fit better to the modern society as a student centered learning. 

Aim for this course is that multicultural authentic learning culture will be created in teams. Learning culture creation is possible when teams work collaboratively being positively dependent on each other. The nine elements of authentic e-learning also support the culture understanding and creation. Learning communities including access to expert thinking with group and individual reflections support the culture creation. 

In Table 1 I have used the template Reflection tool for e-benchmarking to help for the the course definition.

Element of authentic learning	Guidelines for implementation	Course implementation
Provide authentic context that reflects the way the knowledge will be used in real-life	• a physical/virtual environment that reflects the way the knowledge will ultimately be used	Sustainability course aims to gain the skills and knowledge which can be applied to own personal life in order to make sustainable choices.
	• a non-linear design to preserve the complexity of the real-life setting	Aim is to keep the course content flexible. Students can plan to work themselves. Students can choose the topics they want to work with and decide the working order.
Provide authentic activities	• activities that have real-world relevance	Aim of the course is to get it applied in real life with real knowledge.
	• ill-defined complex activities that provide an opportunity for students to define the tasks and sub-tasks required to complete the activity	Purpose is to have a very wide concept of sustainability here as a main subject. Students define the tasks to be done of their own.
	• a sustained period of time for investigation	This course will last several weeks, maybe five to eight weeks.
	• the opportunity for the detection of relevant versus. irrelevant information	Since the sustainability as a subject is wide, there is a variety of inputs available e.g. digital libraries, articles from magazines, interviews of experts, book chapters, videos, statistics and other web sites
	• tasks that can be integrated across subject areas	All tasks are to be integrated in to the area of sustainability
Provide access to expert performances  and the modelling of processes	• access to expert thinking and modelling processes	Accesses to expert skills are provided e.g. with online discussions (e.g. access to expert forums) and several video interviews addition to written articles.
	• access to learners with various levels of expertise	Addition to experts, learners can also learn from each other during discussions and find information we they think is needed e.g. different observations.
	• opportunity for the sharing of narratives and stories and access to the social periphery	Blog writings, online discussion and f2f discussion meetings are arranged in order to share stories.
Provide multiple roles and perspectives	• different perspectives on the topics from various points of view	Purpose is to get as broad view as possible from the sustainability; different points of view can be e.g. population, ecosystems, climate change, energy, agriculture, food and water or individual, company and global view.
	• the opportunity to crisscross the learning environment	The students are able to use the learning resources for multiple purposes and in flexible order.
Support collaborative construction of knowledge	• tasks are completed in pairs or groups rather than individually	The course work is done in groups.
	• appropriate incentive structure for whole group achievement	The assessment is done on group level based on the article and group work (activities during the work).

My international study journey

I´ll make an international study journey to Australia where my objective is to become familiar with the authentic online learning culture. Place is Australia since there is a lot of understanding about authentic eLearning and it´s used there in many places. I should compare the learning culture there to the learning culture at home in such a way that I am able to compare online learning cultures from authentic point of view. I have chosen to benchmark a couple of similar courses in Finland (non-authentic) and Australia (authentic).

Since the purpose of this benchmark is to learn from authentic online learning culture, I choose to apply nine elements of authentic learning proposed by Herrington in benchmarking (http://authenticlearning.info/AuthenticLearning/Home.html). The other option would have been to benchmark more general themes for reflecting learning cultures.

The nine elements of authentic learning are:

    1.Provide authentic contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real life

    2.Provide authentic tasks and activities

    3.Provide access to expert performances and the modelling of processes

    4.Provide multiple roles and perspectives

    5.Support collaborative construction of knowledge

    6.Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed

    7.Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit

    8.Provide coaching and scaffolding by the teacher at critical times

    9.Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks.

I evaluate each of these elements by giving values from zero to three (0-3). If the learning element is fully authentic I give three and if not authentic at all I give zero. I have some remarks under each element what to specially want to look at. I also add some notes of my own to remember later on what basis the value was given.     

My target for benchmark is on so called classroom level (if that is a proper expression regarding online learning). On classroom level student´s and teacher´s views will be noticed.

My benchmarking formula could look like the following:

Authentic elements	Grade visit	Notes	Grade home	Notes
1.Provide authentic contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real life ·       Realistic and real life content
2.Provide authentic tasks and activities ·       Single task and a longer period of time
3.Provide access to expert performances and the modelling of processes ·       links to experts, access to real life
4.Provide multiple roles and perspectives ·       variety of different perspectives
5.Support collaborative construction of knowledge ·       tasks addressed to groups ·       means of communication established
6.Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed ·       discussion forums, written assignments, self-reflections
7.Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit ·       collaborative groups and public presentations
8.Provide coaching and scaffolding by the teacher at critical times ·       support for students when needed
9.Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks. ·       constant and multiple measures

My experiences of teaching and learning culture changes

Teaching and learning cultures have changed and are changing based on my personal experiences. First it maybe better to define what do I mean with the learning culture. There is a number of definitions about it, this is one I recently read and liked: 

“Learning culture refers to operational practices that are characteristic to a learning community which are formed by learning, community, community members and environmental practices, perceptions and beliefs and their interpretation. Learning culture is defined as a set of shared beliefs, values and attitudes favourable to learning. (e.g. Innovative Workplaces, OECD http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/innovative-workplaces_9789264095687-en”

When I went the comprehensive and high school, the teacher was in the center. The learning culture was pretty behaviorist. Though it changed a bit from the very early classes to the time I did the matriculation exam. It was the teacher who knew and pupils spoke when teacher allowed. Learning was very individual, but sometimes we did group work but I´m not sure if that worked well. Usually there were one or two pupils making the work and the others didn´t know so much about it. And about the work of other groups we didn´t have any idea. Groups were pretty homogeneous and we all had a similar background. There wasn´t so much technology in use. I remember a tape recorder and an overhead projector. In very rare cases there was a television in a classroom and we watched a video. 

The learning style didn´t change when I went to university. Professors there were even more distant and classes bigger. Research work was new and gave the possibility to do something independently too and a bit more teamwork was done. During that time the computers started to get a bigger role in studies too. We still read books and papers but we were able to produce our own material with computers. 

 
When I started my working career the digital technology was there. My working life was knowledge work and it changed gradually global and the technology was a necessity for daily communications. It was an everyday life to collaborate in a virtual team online in a multinational environment. A new multicultural online working culture was created which helped us to work together. I saw at work the potential technology can give to learning too but still I had a quite old fashioned idea about schools and learning which bothered me. I wanted to understand better the learning today. 

I started my teacher studies and got familiar with an online learning environment Moodle and Optima which enabled group work and reflection. I was also fascinated about the idea of Coursera, where the top universities and organizations in the world offer courses online for anyone for free. I experienced that the technology was available for learning. I also understood that online learning has a lot of potential which is not yet in use. There was too much traditional teacher centered learning culture implemented which didn´t fit for online. 

I also see my kids go a bit similar school than I used to go. Today there are computers in schools, but the classroom looks pretty much the same like it used to look some decades ago. Thinking the world were my kids live at free time or the knowledge work today, school and way of learning there looks quite old fashioned. 

My experiences of online learning and schools tell me that it´s difficult and slow to change the existing learning culture to something else. Even when we know that the old way of learning doesn´t meet the needs of knowledge working life. I´m also sure that today’s kids would like to have the learning culture that fits their world they are living. They have already learned to communicate online in an multicultural environment (but not at school).

So far I have at least understood the need to change the learning culture. Based on my work experience I believe I can understand the nature of knowledge work and what kind of skills are needed there. As a learner I experienced that digitalize the traditional way of learning is not enough. As a mother I also see the huge difference of two worlds my kids live. The way of learning has to change.

This course I´m now attending suggests that authentic e-learning could be the way to change learning. When following authentic e-learning framework, the student-centered and active learning culture can be developed. Then the emphasis is on the collaborative completion of realistic artifacts, similar to those that people would do in real-world professional situations. It means that a shared culture of both the context and the product must be developed by students as they engage with the task. (Teräs, H., Leppisaari, I., Teräs, M. & Herrington, J. (2012, pp. 29-36). During this course the understanding of this framework will get better. Possibly this could be the learning culture I also would like to create and promote. I´m interested.

Teräs, H., Leppisaari, I., Teräs, M. & Herrington, J. (2012). Facilitating the development of multicultural learning communities through authentic e-learning. In Kommers, P., Issa, T. & Isaias, P. (Eds.) Proceedings of IADIS International Conference on International Higher Education (IHE 2012) (pp. 29-36). PDF