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Creating and Using Blended Learning Classrooms - MOOC and Community Extension
Now that the course has ended as of March 11, 2020, let's move to a more open space
Why set up a MOOC - community extension?
If you are enrolled in the Schoology course, then you can see the last announcement I posted on March 13 informing participants where the course was headed after it had officially ended on March 11.
You are welcome to enroll in Schoology, but there is no need to. You are welcome to visit or interact there, but if you want to participate in the MOOC / Community open web space, you can read the notice here ...
The English Language Specialist eLearning course on Creating and Using a Blended Learning Environment ended officially on March 11, 2020.
If you participated in this course, thank you! It was a challenging course for me to create, and interactions with participants were quite stimulating.
As I pointed out in the workshops I gave as truly blended classrooms in Thailand in January, I consider a teacher to be a master learner who models and demonstrates (and practices and reflects). My style is to model what I consider to be best practices. In keeping with the times in which this course took place, I tried to model how teachers could set up blended learning classrooms, and then transition to a fully online environment, as I needed to do by following up on the original workshops online, and as many teachers are having to do suddenly and unexpectedly in their face-to-face classrooms these days.
My last effort here to model best practices is to show how it could be possible to transition the online course into a MOOC or community environment, where the routine and pace and march-to -completion of a "course" no longer pertain, but where people who wanted to could move to this extension space, and where others could join in if the idea took off.
So thank you if you participated in this course, and I'll be watching the community spaces in case anyone wants to keep momentum going there. And if that doesn't happen here, as least I am showing what could be done with a course if its teacher wanted to create a blended learning classroom for it.
In placing this course online I've shown how the blended learning classroom could be moved online, and how, if its participants wanted to keep interacting as a community of practice, spaces could be created for that purpose.
It would be nice to carry forward in those spaces, and that would be icing on the cake that this course was meant to deliver.
How does the MOOC / Community space work?
The space consists of what was left online after having conducted workshops for two weeks f2f in Thailand. I followed that up with 3 weeks of online learning. When I went to Thailand at the end of January COVID-19 was just becoming a concern. By the time I wrapped up the online course on March 11 schools were starting to shut down worldwide and it was becoming apparent that what I had been doing the previous six weeks, teaching f2f in a blended learning environment and then transitioning that to online, had some potential as a model for others to follow suit.
What I have done has finished as far as the English Language Program / RELO Bangkok is concerned, but the materials are all online, including
Here are its parts
- The course materials which I introduced f2f at several locations in Thailand are here: http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/
- The eLearning course portal where my job was to facilitate use of the materials from the workshops are here:
http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom
- The interactive part of the course was in Schoology; enrollment instructions here: edit
http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom#Howtojointhiscourse
- There is a MOOC / Community space, open ended, which I set up here:
http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138923232/MOOC_Community_Extension
- The latter has produced a resource document, both crowd-sourced and curated, giving resources aimed at answering the question, What if my school closes? here:
http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138990084/What_if_my_school_suddenly_closes
What can you do here?
You can help us crowd-source resources for people having to transition suddenly from f2f to online
This eLearning class ended on March 11 and I continued updating the resources on the Week 3 page until March 15.
On March 16, 2020 I created this page and will enter all further updates here:
http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138990084/What_if_my_school_suddenly_closes
YOU can propose resources to be added to the page above by writing them in here
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pm4Q_jJbrWKu38-xv8-2QFrn-ialnZBT-qDofoXAWcY/edit?usp=sharing
Please help by contributing :-)
You can participate in ongoing Learning2gether webinar podcasts
See the schedule of upcoming events here
http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded
Archives
You can join our Groups.io listserv group
I set up this group for this purpose. So far (March 16) it has attracted 3 members
https://groups.io/g/blendedclassrooms/
You can join at the link above or enter your email address where indicated below and click on subscribe.
Group description
This is the discussion group portal for participants in an eLearning class called Learning How to Create and Use a Blended Learning Classroom. The course ran from February 20 to March 11, at which time the course ended, and moved into a MOOC / community phase.
The course followed a series of workshops conducted by English Language Specialist Vance Stevens at various universities and language centers in Thailand intended for English lecturers and undergraduate and graduate university English majors on using CALL (computer-assisted language learning) and technology for blended classrooms. The workshops modeled how teachers can create blended learning environments using free Web 2.0 tools and websites. More information on those workshops can be found at the portal site here: http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/
If you are interested in developing and sharing your expertise in blended classrooms, you are welcome to join this group.io.
Late breaking news
Another group I have been involved with for decades is starting to write on this topic.
If that persists I might suggest that people here join that group, in order to have more participants interacting.
I'll update this as I see how things are going there - Vance, March 15, 2020
You can still enroll in the Schoology course
if you would like to interact with other participants there
Follow the instructions here
http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom#Howtojointhiscourse
Note
Participation in or enrollment in the Schoology course is optional; in other words you don’t have to be interacting there in order to participate in the MOOC Community. I have set up spaces outside of Schoology for that. But if you wish, you CAN enroll in the Schoology course. I'll receive alerts if anything happens there, It’s set up to run to the end of the year, and I can renew it then if I wish.
Also, in setting up this space, my main purpose is two-fold. Fold one is to model how a community could be managed as an extension to a course, if there were sufficient interest in that, and fold two is to see what happens :-). Maybe a community will form there, maybe not. Either way, another possibility of blended online classrooms, the possibility of perpetuating them as community spaces, is modeled.
You can always send a tweet
Your tweets tagged #blended2020 will be aggregated a this Twitter search
https://twitter.com/hashtag/blended2020?src=hashtag_click&f=live
This tweet: https://twitter.com/VanceS/status/1238343497008046080
These materials were created by
Vance Stevens, https://learning2gether.net
for presentation at ELSpecialist workshops and ThaiTESOL for two weeks in Thailand in January, 2020 and a follow-up eLearning course that took place from February 20 to March 11, 2020
You are free to share-alike and with attribution under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The date of this update is February 25, 2021
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