Report on the webinar: Supporting students for meaningful online learning

156 participants were enrolled to participate in this webinar on ‘Supporting students for meaningful online learning’ presented by Filip Dejonckheere, Janne Karjalainen and Ulla-Maija Törmälä.

In this webinar some parts of the development work on designing and running a COHEHRE Academy online course for students were disseminated and their learnings shared during the past Covid-19 year. The key concepts of this webinar were:

  • Online learning
  • Student engagement
  • Learning communities
  • Usual communication for shared understanding

These are all based on their own experiences ​as well as researches of education.

The development process for students to go through in the recent COHEHRE course on Social Entrepreneurship ​and Poverty was illustrated. This process is vital for students to have an understanding on how a process works and could take this into their future engagements.

Subjects that were touched were

  • Use of platforms (Mural, Teams)
  • The importance of visual communication
  • The steps that students go through in the development of an engaging learning community + examples of methods
  • Engagement and building a learning community before the start of the course
  • ​Importance of emtotions for learning and how to share emotions during the course to stay connected to learning
  • Build a common understanding in your team
  • The most precious thing of the course: an international and interdisciplinary team
  • ​Right time teaching supporting learning
  • Assessment
  • ​Supporting personalised learning by using reflective learning

The testimonial of Ruby from Suriname on the Social Entrepreneurship course showed that students are still learning after the end of the course or that they are still working on the product they were developing. Their engagement is still present and in there lies the basic difference between the Social Entrepreneurship course and other courses in normal times/Corona times. In most of the courses the curve of student interest goes up steadily and at one point the students loose interest. This course, however, was designed on project-based learning with ups-and-downs purposely embedded in the course. This resulted in the highest interest peaking at the end of the course, thinking about what is next and how to proceed with the empowerment of their own learning.

Has your interest been piqued? Be welcome to revisit the recording of the webinar here

How did Tamira experience the course? Read Tamira’s reflections, peer feedback, team-assessment and self-assessment here.

More info (readings and links) on the ‘Creating a Social Entrepreneurship to fight poverty’- course can be found here.