ONL11-pbl09-ok

Learning in communities is of course nothing new. Nevertheless it may be a very efficient way of learning [1].  First, learning in a community is fun ! One gets to share the knowledge, clear misconceptions and gain deeper understanding through discussions.  A good example of learning together is our ability to solve the Covid-19 virus spread together; together as the whole world. Learning together will increase our social network or personal learning network (PLN) [2,3]. This will increase the ability to work together with people from various backgrounds and one learns various perspectives to the same topic from course mates. This creates a greater awareness for the learning process. Also, if help is needed, is will be close. The course mates are probably able to help. Furthermore, arguing together will increase skills to a higher level. There are also ways to make the joint effort easier as many times there are also some challenges in working in a group (cooperation vs collaboration).

Blended learning is mixed up in my mind into active learning. By active learning, I understand giving the students something 'more' than teacher talking alone for 1.5 hours. But blended learning (BL) is actually about blending face-to-face and online teaching. Then, what is face-to-face ? One could think that it is only physical meetings but it is actually also online meetings with faces showing to the participants. This is the bit confusing part. Clearly, we have a connection to the concepts of synchronous and asynchronous learning within blended learning. This means that are we learning at the same time  or not. Here, things get confusing if we start to assume that we may have face-to-face learning that is also asynchronous ... ? Can we ? The term COI (Community of Inquiry) pops up here and there when diving into BL. The meaning of it is many times made too complex by using 'scientific language'. As Cleveland-Innes [1] nicely puts it, COI can be viewed simply as '