Tag: collaboration

Two student having a conversation via video.
Creating Value & Memorable Learning Asynchronously: Dialogic Pedagogy for Dialogue Tools 

Creating Value & Memorable Learning Asynchronously: Dialogic Pedagogy for Dialogue Tools 

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A perpetual challenge we (instructors, instructional designers, teaching assistants, learning engineers, educational technologists, and anyone learning online) encounter with online teaching and learning occurs in the absence of live engagement: how do we facilitate and engage meaningful exchanges within the classroom when there are no classes or classroom? (For the sake of brevity, I am excluding the parallel difficulties of engaging organic dialogue in a face-to-face classroom.) 

Though we have learning technologies within our supported Loyola tools that are capable of facilitating asynchronous conversations, how might we make those exchanges memorable learning activities? Daisaku Ikeda’s Soka pedagogy might provide those of us designing engagement activities for our asynchronous learners with a compass aimed at value creation in education. 

Meeting Ikeda and value creation dialogue 

I was first introduced to Ikeda’s value-creating dialogic pedagogy as a College of Education graduate writing group facilitator at the DePaul University Center for Writing-based Learning. In our writing group meetings, doctoral candidate Melissa Bradford (now part of the DePaul College of Education teaching faculty) shared across her drafts the power of Ikeda’s dialogic pedagogy that unfolds in a mentor-mentee relationship.  

Born in Tokyo in 1928, Daisaku Ikeda was among the first generation of schoolchildren educated in the Japanese wartime indoctrination system (Goulah & Ito, 2015, p. 57). Ikeda’s experience of human loss, militant subjugation, and postwar chaos encountered surprise at the worldview of Josei Toda, an educator with a faith-based and peace-oriented opposition towards Japanese wars of conquest. After hearing Toda speak at a Soka (literally value-creating) Gakkai (Society) meeting, Ikeda subsequently became Toda’s student and mentee (Goulah & Ito, 2015, p. 58).   

Melissa’s focus on Soka, or value-creating, pedagogy emphasized the importance of dialogue between invested interlocutors. Through intentional and ongoing dialogue, building a mentor-mentee relationship also becomes possible. The underlying heritage of Soka pedagogy seeks to “engage students in learning to learn and to derive wisdom from knowledge to create meaningful value in and from any positive or negative situation” (Goulah & Ito, 2015, p. 60). To clarify, value-creating pedagogy does not signify an instructor imparting their values onto their students, but rather, value creation refers to the collaborative meaning that rises out of engaging with self and others.  

Connecting value-creating pedagogy to Jesuit values 

As a Blue Rambler (DePaul Blue Demon and Loyola Rambler, anyone?), I am in a serendipitous intersection to connect Vincentian personalism with the Jesuit value of accompaniment. Through facilitating dialogue between peers, we provide opportunities for us to recognize the dignity of our fellow colleagues in a class by cultivating community and strengthening a mentor-mentee relationships. These interrelated missions, though stated by different schools and denominations, underlie our interconnected and human-centered values.  

In Thoughts on Education for Global Citizenship, Ikeda posits that “students’ lives are not changed by lectures, but by people” (Ikeda, 1996b, p. 31 qtd. In Goulah & Ito, 2015). Though prerecorded lectures may be a central means of delivering content in an asynchronous online course, how might we consider engaging interactions between people? 

Try a learning design: Value-creating pedagogy with asynchronous dialogue tools 

One teaching and learning approach and mindset shift we can make is rethinking our student-instructor interactions, even asynchronously. Instead of simply assigning closed discussions for the sake of a knowledge check, how might we engage interactions in a class aimed at collaborative value creation? As an organic bonus, how might value creating pedagogy help students achieve learning outcomes through our learning design?  

Here are some learning design goals that might be generalizable across disciplines, paired with a possible option for asynchronous tool-based dialogue: 

  • To facilitate community amongst peers within an academic or professional field.  
  • A corresponding learning design choice could be a dialogue tool such as VoiceThread or Piazza.  
  • To cultivate a mentor-mentee relationship and/or offer higher-level thesis advising. 
  • Recurring informal checkpoints or brainstorming dialogues through native Messages or Discussions tools in Sakai. 

More to Consider 

Like any use of technology-based teaching and learning design, a tool can only take you so far: framing the purpose and context for engaging with the tool is vital to the impact of the learning design. Some student-based ideas for engagement offered by Georgia Tech might help you craft intentional prompts for meaningful dialogue.  

Finally, our Loyola Learning Technologies & Innovation team invites you to join us for more dialogue ideas at our upcoming webinar Talk It Out: Enhance Learning with Asynchronous Dialogue Tools in Sakai on Thursday, 3/20 at 11am.  

Works Cited  

“Engaging Students with Online Discussions.” Center for Teaching & Learning. Georgia Tech. https://ctl.gatech.edu/engaging-students-online-discussions 

Goulah, J., & Ito, T. (2012). Daisaku Ikeda’s Curriculum of Soka Education: Creating Value Through Dialogue, Global Citizenship, and “Human Education” in the Mentor–Disciple Relationship. Curriculum Inquiry, 42(1), 56–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-873X.2011.00572.x 

 

 

Three students happily working on laptops at shared table
Empowering Learners to Work in Community: Designing for Collaborative Learning

Empowering Learners to Work in Community: Designing for Collaborative Learning

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Collaboration, teamwork, community: these terms are familiar across disciplines and industries, and often, they reflect organizational values and goals. Collaboration is supposed to be a worthwhile practice for the benefit of the stakeholders involved.  

And yet, why do students dread group projects? As a lifelong student and instructor of adult learners, let’s together consider the dynamics of a typical group: one or two students do most of the work, one disappears from group communications until the day before a deadline due to unforeseen circumstances, and the less dominant members offer contributions that are either dismissed or less prioritized by the self-appointed group leaders.  

As an instructor or one possessing instructional design responsibilities for learning, there are ways to facilitate collaboration for students that might avoid common pitfalls to meaningful and equitable peer exchange. This includes student-to-instructor exchange, as a common approach to online learning via prerecorded lectures and auto-graded feedback leaves students without a feeling of human connection or presence—hardly collaborative.  

Collaborative learning and learning design  

Continuing a keywords-inspired approach of unpacking a learning design referent to extract pedagogical and practical applications, let’s take on the subject of collaborative learning design.  

The way I refer to collaborative learning is inspired by my time in writing center work and composition studies, namely Andrea Lunsford’s (1991) article “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” Lunsford’s work on collaboration and learning has found collaboration to engage students and encourage active learning; lead to higher academic achievement; support deeper critical thinking; and lead to deeper understanding of others (p. 5). Such collaboration is not synonymous with lack of direction, support, or inclusion for its members. 

Research-based keys to collaborative learning  

Both the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) offer research-based support for collaboration. Below are some synthesized findings between a learning design perspective, student perspectives for collaborative learning, and a renewed approach to inclusive teaching. Insights are lifted from the CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, the 2024 OLC Report, “Empowering Change Together: Student Perspectives on Quality Online, Digital, and Blended Learning,” and insights from the Inclusive Teaching in STEM course faculty edX.  

Sustain engagement through careful learning community. According to CAST (2018), learners in the 21st century “must be able to communicate and collaborate within a community,” as such mindfully structured peer work can “significantly increase the available support for sustained engagement.” Student feedback highlighted the desire for community in online learning environments, as well as faculty responsibility for fostering class participation in such a way that acknowledged social challenges from not being in a physical classroom (OLC, 2024, p. 12). For instructors stuck with a lack of engagement, defining peer roles, expectations, and means for providing one another with feedback instills a sense of responsibility in one another’s learning and success.  

Create a culture of collaboration by enabling learners to be active agents in designing their learning. UDL Checkpoint 8.3: Foster collaboration and community specifies a strategy to “Create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities.” The OLC finds that students also “want to be consulted as co-creators of community and DEI strategy,” moving beyond buzzwords to adaptable, actionable frameworks for practice (p. 13). A course lends itself as a space to facilitate a community of practice that rises out of a body of theory or aligned with learning goals. Allowing each member of a course community to co-design their individual roles and recognize their own commitments to the greater whole helps to build rapport while learning.  

Collaborative learning tool spotlight: VoiceThread 

Learning tools designed to facilitate feedback and collaboration can help instructors save time on designing technical logistics for student activities. Some tools also offer multiple modes of engaging dialogue and feedback between members. 

Though several learning tools may overlap in learning activity type, such as written discussions or conversations, few offer specifically collaborative engagement adaptable for a variety of activities as much as VoiceThread. With the new user interface to be fully implemented by this June, VoiceThread also offers a more accessible tool for learners to engage in collaborative learning. VoiceThread facilitates multimodal means for members to give one another feedback, including written, audio, and video commenting.  

Learning design for collaboration 

Let us also not forget Lunsford’s (1991) warning of collaboration misconstrued in pedagogical application, where such can “masquerade as democracy when it in fact practices the same old authoritarian control” (p. 3-4). Collaborative learning design must be careful and clear in its aim to empower students to take part in constructing their learning contexts and sense of community.  

 

CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2.
Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org 

Lunsford, A. (1991). Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center. The Writing Center Journal, 12(1), 3–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43441887  

Weber, N.L. & Gay, K. (2024). Empowering change together: Student perspectives on quality
online, digital, and blended learning. Online Learning Consortium.  

Image credit: Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash