Moving education online, as it was the case with emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaves you using only two senses, which clearly limits the teaching/learning experience, making it challenging for everyone involved.

Now, in the post-pandemic world there is this added emphasis on the implementation of the hybrid teaching/learning, which blends online and face-to-face aspects of education. It comes with some significant administrative advantages (access, retention, campus space, teaching resources). But there are also some major challenges, and the most important of them (from the teacher’s perspective) is developing pedagogy to meet the needs of the new channels.

During online teaching a lecturer is challenged by the silence from the audience during their attempts to activate the audience. You are tempted to fill it, most importantly because of no indication whether the participants are thinking about the best way to react or fail to understand the question, or maybe they are doing something else completely. It seems to particularly difficult when the participants refuse to switch their cameras on.

I really enjoyed the webinar with Kay Oddone and Alastair Creelman. During her presentation she referred to the differences between a community and a network based on the work of Wenger, Trayner & de Laat (2011) where community is developed around a shared interest and its members wish to advance their knowledge about the shared domain and also create a sense of identity and a shared practice. And it s tightly knit and tends to be created for a particular purpose and time period. Network on the other hand may be intentional or serendipitous; there is no commitment of its members to the shared domain. Moreover it tends to be typified by a rich web of information resources, which provides the potential for collective exploration, but no collective intention or design. It is a loosely organized structure which depends on individual nodes to contribute and filter.

I found this distinction very eye-opening and it made me reflect, in which contexts in different areas of my professional life I am a community member and in which only a member of a network.