Applying ‘critical thinking’ to learning?

This week’s blog post was intended to be a personal reflection of the Coursera MOOC Learning to Teach Online that my University of Limerick colleagues (both module leaders and moderators, current and aspiring) might consider when pondering their own continuing professional development. However, this week’s content on my IDEL course is all about critical thinking, critical reading, critical writing (honestly!) and so it makes more sense to apply some of those learnings to my review of LTTO. Forgive me as I refer to my notes throughout!

Always good to start with a working definition in my opinion so here goes:

Courtesy of the Institute for Academic Development at the University of Edinburgh

Sounds fair enough and by taking a ‘build as you go’ approach then hopefully by the time I get to the end of this post it might be worth reading!

This is where I would have copy/pasted some descriptive sentences from the MOOC overview but in my attempt to think more critically I would have to say that there is much more content behind the title itself. LTTO as a title doesn’t reflect the breadth of the content across 6 weeks summarised in modules as follows:

    Module 1: Why is Online Teaching Important?

    Module 2: Open and Institutionally Supported Technologies

    Module 3: Planning Online Learning

    Module 4: Online Learning Activities

    Module 5: Online Assessment Strategies

    Module 6: Online Resources

    Module 7: Engaging and Motivating Students

    Module 8: Evaluation Strategies

At the outset, I found it really helpful that learners were tasked with an assignment to “briefly describe an online activity, assessment, or resource that you will design that uses online technology in some way”. Following on from this we had to “explain why we had chosen this particular technology instead of other technologies” so it was a very practical assignment that was a useful reference throughout the MOOC.

What I found most interesting in terms of the focus of each of the above modules was the personalisation element. I say personalisation but most likely there was a significant level of automation in the background based on my responses to the questionnaires set for each activity, covering both self-evaluation and knowledge. From a learner engagement perspective, it was helpful to see a score and then this was supplemented by a recommended reading list – how cool is that? I have to admit that I haven’t read many of the recommendations provided to me but I have a list and know where to go when in the future I’m interested in Module 7: Engaging and Motivating Students*

My argument is that in addition to the resources already offered by UL for staff supporting the online MSc in Project and Programme Management there is a case for ownership of professional development at the individual level. One of my peers during week 2 of IDEL summarised the key elements of TPACK which I had not come across before, three of the seven components as follows:

    TK – The vital aspect is the pedagogical application of technology to facilitate learning to deliver the content.

    PK – Pedagogical knowledge is teachers’ awareness about how to teach well.

    CK –  The teachers’ knowledge of the content (the subject) to be taught is of critical importance.

As module leaders and moderators, it’s likely fair to say that we’re confident in our content knowledge (CK) that we keep up to date through readings etc. but improvement is always possible in pedagogical knowledge (PK) and technological knowledge (TK). To this end, I recommend the LTTO MOOC as a useful starting point for our continuing professional development.

I don’t think this post is as ‘critical’ as I would like it to be, but it’s a start and at 700 words I’ll continue to work on my ‘critical’ everything skills!