Week Four: Activity 4.2
Activity 4.2. Blog
Week four’s questions focus on the communities of practice.
Was this experience valuable to you? How so?
Yes, this course has been valuable in walking us through the basics of learning theories and instructional models. I think it is useful to consider using communities of practice to expand one’s knowledge of a professional domain and to discussion problems and research from within that domain with fellow practitioners. I have been utilizing them for several years and find them beneficial to staying up-to-date on research and current trends.
Would you recommend to your faculty or another instructional design colleague the use of communities of practice for teaching and learning?
Yes, I think face-to-face or online communities of practice for teaching and learning are ideal. Hearing other case studies and seeing how other faculty and designers have attempted to resolve similar issues or problems is very instructive. In most cases, faculty learn about other ways of teaching by observing their peers or talking to their peers, so communities of practice simply make this process slightly more regular and methodical (if not always more formal).
Do you have any suggestions for making the experience more valuable?
I think providing the week four reading in week one would help participants who are new to the idea of Communities of Practice have some understanding of their background and design. This would help participants make a more informed decision about which CoP’s are a good fit for their interests and professional needs, and better inform the process of interacting in the CoP’s over the four weeks of the course. For participants already active in CoP’s, it would be good to allow them to add them to the list of CoP’s instead of selecting new ones from a generalized topical list.
What final insights did you learn about your chosen learning goals from Week 1?
There was an interesting development today for OER resources, where Cengage is now adding some testing materials to the free textbook available through OpenStax and charging $25 per student. There is quite a bit of pushback from faculty in my CoP’s who are disappointed with Cengage, and it makes me wonder why OpenStax has chosen to partner with a for-profit company when they were already allowing faculty to create materials to go with their textbook for free. It certainly makes me glad I did not provide them any of the materials I was building to go along with their textbook, and I am questioning whether or not I will go with another OER resource for my history textbook this spring.
Comments
Post a Comment