FFAM – Faculty of Fine Arts and Music

Welcome to our new FFAM blog page for Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning (or SoTEL as it is commonly abbreviated to). I’m just creating an initial post to get us started with some discussion and reflection on technology enhanced learning generally, and online teaching and learning more specifically in light of current COVID times where we have all found ourselves thrown headfirst into online teaching whether we like it or not! This is particularly difficult for practical subjects like music. In first semester I had to work out how to translate Music Therapy Methods for first years and Clinical Practice in Music Therapy for second year Master’s students into adequate and acceptable online versions. Luckily, I was pretty comfortable using Zoom and working my way around a Canvas site already. Although I soon learned that teaching online isn’t as simple as providing live lectures via Zoom. And (like many in our Faculty) I had the added complication of not being able to facilitate live group music making online as part of student learning. As we all now know, Zoom fatigue is real and I needed to transfer the problem-based and collaborative peer learning approaches used in face-to-face classes to an online format to maintain stimulating and engaging learning experiences.

As part of my Graduate Certificate in University Teaching, I enrolled in the ‘Facilitating Online Learning’ subject that Thomas Cochrane coordinates and have been learning loads about learning theories, frameworks and resources that we can draw on to best facilitate online learning. As part of this subject we had to create an ePortfolio and make regular blog posts on the things that we have been learning about and also comment on each other’s posts. It has been a great learning experience actually to experience the creation of an interactive Community of Inquiry. I’ve made several posts already that may be useful to this new FFAM-specific SoTEL Community of Inquiry that we are developing. So far these have explored creating Visitors and Residents Maps (to visually map how we interact with technology in both professional and personal domains), contemplating the Ecology of Resources model, thinking about how to establish Research Groups Online, unpacking Design-based Research, and reflecting on Laurillard’s Conversational Framework. I hope some of these posts might stimulate some discussion, sharing, mentoring and collaboration on this FFAM SoTEL blog page.

Dr Jeanette Tamplin (Senior Lecturer in Music Therapy)