Professional Development through MOOCs: Active Learning in Flexible Learning Spaces
Ozan Tekin
In the spring of 2022, I had the chance to participate in a MOOC as part of the Project Novigado funded with support from the Erasmus + Programme of the European Commission. The main goal of the Project is to form an active online community of educators engaged in innovating teaching. In order to materialize this, an online course titled ‘’Active Learning and Innovative Teaching in Flexible Learning Spaces’’ was created as part of the Project. One of the learning objectives of the course ‘’Active Learning and Innovative Teaching in Flexible Learning Spaces’’ is ‘’to explore learning beyond the traditional classroom setting’’, which served as a crucial motivator for me to participate as we have been involved in designing learning spaces online since the pandemic outbreak.
The course is designed into four modules in each of which the participants are exposed to a plethora of input in relation to the concept of active learning, and also engaged in conversation and peer feedback practice, which increases motivation for learning. The participants have access to resources such as articles, videos etc to help them learn the input at their own pace in the boundaries of a deadline. In each module, there are activities that help forge an online community as well as working with the input. In the final module, all the participants are required to create a lesson plan through the learning scenario tool on the Project website, and also expected to provide peer feedback to different lesson plans in order to be awarded with a certificate at the end of the course. After the submission of the lesson plan and peer feedback results, a group of experts assess your learning scenario to be included in the resources section of the Project website.
To meet the requirements of the course, I prepared a learning scenario on how to integrate evidence into a text in an online learning space, focusing on history and academic writing in particular. It is based on a lesson plan I prepared as part of the SPS 102 course I was teaching in the Fall 2021 semester. The learning scenario I created was selected by the assessment committee in the top twenty four scenarios, and is now curated on the Future Classroom Lab.
