Welcome to Learning and Teaching in Practice

by Sebastiaan ter Burg

Welcome everyone to Learning and Teaching in Practice. This is a big course. Big credits (45), big learning hours (450), big expectations for all of us no doubt, and hopefully a pretty big and memorable experience. How big can it get? Manageable we hope. To keep you in touch with what is going on in the course we will use this blog to tell you interesting stuff and to showcase what people are doing. Make sure you subscribe by email to the blog.

During the course, we will walk you through what it means to be a teacher in a learner-centred and experiential pedagogy and introduce you to some technologies to support this. We will assist you to develop or maybe change your teaching philosophy, and you will discover, we hope, some exciting ways to design learner-centric environments. Personalised learning and collaborative learning are biggies for us so.....we are asking that you keep a blog to document your thinking and learning as you go. If you want your learners to do things like keep an e-portfolio or a blog, then you need to experience it for yourself first. 

Why a blog?
A blog is great for sharing ideas and information and giving each other encouragement. It becomes your space to do with as you will.  If you choose the right place to set it up, you can take it wherever you go, so think of it as an expandable suitcase full of goodies which never wears out. The possibilities are endless. The course blog is on blogger.com and it has everything you need and is simple to use. Some of you may prefer to use an existing blog (great stuff) or to experiment with other platforms.

We won't be playing 'big brother' exactly but being able to give you some pointers and feedback on your blog as you go helps us to feel useful. You see we have this silly idea that if you are active on your blog, then you are participating in the course activities and learning. We love action!

Some of my previous students have gone on to use their blogs for professional purposes. Sarah Stewart is a great example of someone who has gone on to be a very active blogger about her practice as a midwifery educator. If you follow her, you will also find out who she is as a person. She knows how to write without compromising privacy so check it out if you are worried about this side of things.

Keeping a blog will also help you to develop your thinking for your assessment portfolio, and for some of you the blog and assessment portfolio may be one and the same.

When does a blog become an assessment portfolio?
Some of you will find that your blog will also serve as an assessment portfolio. It depends how you want to organise it and what you want to put in the portfolio. If you have lots of files, then you will need another spot for them.  Google sites is great for doing this. You can also set up a 'navigation tree' so things can be found easily. I have set up an assessment portfolio as an exemplar, and intend to keep adding to it as the course progresses. What you put in yours will look very different to mine but hopefully it will give you some ideas.

Morepork Owl by Russell Chilton

For each module you will need to document these aspects for assessment in this course:

• evidence of your learning, 
• a narrative about that evidence, and 
• reflective discussion about your learning and practice. 

You are also asked to support your ideas and writing with references from the literature - research articles from journals, and good quality articles, information and reports from websites.

We are hot on APA referencing in this course. The Purdue Owl APA Formatting and Style Guide can help with this as she is very wise. Original ideas and discussion of lots of different perspectives are well sought after - there is no right answer in this course. All the detail about assessment is on the Course Outline on the course website.