Otl301 – Post 4

Interview Summary

This post is an interview with my colleague who teaches several entry courses. The focus of this interview is on his strategies for facilitating both social and cognitive presence throughout his teaching experience and his perspective on the concept of Community of Inquiry (CoI).

It was not a challenge to me to decide whom I should be talking to about this subject since I knew my colleague Dr. Korosh Pourdavie, who teaches chemistry at KPU, is always very up-to-date about the latest concepts in teaching and learning theories. The following is a summary of the phone interview that I had with him.  I would like to thank Korosh for taking the time to answer my questions.  His ideas, as always, are interesting to me. I think many of his ideas are practical and can be implemented in both online and f2f teaching environments.

 

Q.1) In your teaching practice, what are the things you do to effectively facilitate both social and cognitive presence and to promote the construction of knowledge?
KP: In each of the courses that I teach, I have implemented several project-based assignments and lots of class activities to promote collaboration and a sense of community among my students. I am open and friendly and try to provide my students with continual feedback. My hope is that they see my behaviour as a role model and do their best to contribute to in-class and team activities. I remind them that there is no judgment in my classes and we all learn from our mistakes. I am not very worried if there are some less active people in the groups as they will eventually start to participate in the actual cognitive and social presence by initiating further interaction with their peers and the learning activity. They will become proficient in initiation questions and searching for answers by doing project assignments and will start to construct meaningful results. I will supervise them throughout their projects and learning journeys.

 

Q.2) What kind of technology-based learning activities or digital tools have you implemented to increase student engagement and support the process of critical discourse?
KP: I primarily use short videos for giving feedback to my students. Many learning management systems these days allow incorporation of audio/video commenting and I greatly use this feature. I think this method is much more engaging than text-based comments. I often receive audio or video responses from students and I am happy to see this level of excitement and activity from students.  I also try to use discussion forum as much as possible especially for giving direction to all the member in a team project. Plus I create and manage a Q&A page in the course page. The idea here is to share the common questions and answers to them with everyone in class. I often see very constructive comments by students to their peers leading to further discussions. Finally, I constantly communicate with learners via email. I answer their questions including answers to previously-posted assignments and share with them all the course materials.

Q.3) What do you see as challenging issues when you try to facilitate deep, meaningful learning experiences for your students?
KP: I think the most challenging part is how to keep students interested in all the learning activities including those that they have to do in chemistry labs. Doing experiments is a pivotal component of chemistry courses but I sometimes see student are not very interested in lab activities. In some case, students only follow instructions like a recipe in a cookbook without critical thinking about the reasons behind the steps taken in an experiment and the interpretation of observations. Such challenges are very likely to exist in the so called “virtual lab” activities in distance education. To address these challenges, at least partly, I will use student feedback in my course design. By knowing students’ opinions about different aspects of the course and which experiments or activities they find more exciting, I will try to promote both social and cognitive processes by creating activities that provide better chances for student-student and student-content and student-teacher interactions. As part of my practice to exchange ideas about the course and learning activities, I set up a designated page on discussion forums for this purpose and I always see great feedback from students. My ultimate goal here is to develop a sense of community and belonging among my students. This would provide an opportunity to push the class beyond collaboration, and into the process of sharing knowledge, critical thinking and deeper learning.