Open networked learning – a course, a community, an approach

Open Networked Learning (ONL) is a collaborative open online course for higher education educators worldwide, focusing on open education, collaborative learning, and course design. The interorganizational course welcomes both institutional and open learners from around 30 nations. Delivered 17 times since 2014 with up to 120 participants in each session, ONL employs problem-based learning to foster digital competencies and strengthen community development. Rooted in the European Framework for Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), a study involving 48 participants revealed statistically significant, across-the-board competence enhancement post-course, affirming ONL’s efficacy. The article also summarizes our experiences and learnings from participating in and organising the course over the past ten years.


Introduction
Academic development programs in higher education have been established and systematically investigated for decades (Amundsen & Wilson, 2012).Also referred to as faculty, professional, or educational development, they can take many different forms, both formally and informally, and include diverse areas such as technology-enhanced teaching, recognition of an individual's teaching identity, and partnership engagements with faculties and departments (Sugrue et al., 2018).Initiatives usually focus on three interdependent levels: the institutional, the program, or the individual (Hénard, 2010).Common formalised initiatives are courses and programmes on broad areas such as 'fundamentals of teaching' (Noben et al., 2021) or more specific areas such as facilitating sustainable agency among teachers (Englund & Price, 2018).Academic development plays a crucial role in enhancing the quality of teaching and overall professional growth of faculty members (Patfield et al., 2022) and is strategically important (Sutherland, 2018).
Strikingly, the vast majority of the initiatives are situated within the institution.Courses are predominantly provided by each higher education institution (HEI) for its own staff.Some courses for continuing professional development are open to participants outside their own institution, mainly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provided through platforms such as EdX or Coursera (Sandeen, 2013).Even fewer examples of interorganizational courses or programmes are described in the literature.Two exceptions are the 'Open Courses' in Ireland (Donnelly & Maguire, 2020) and the courses offered by the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC) in South Africa (Collett et al., 2018).This is somewhat surprising because community building among teachers across organisations is an oft-mentioned quality criteria of academic development programs (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017;Lawless & Pellegrino, 2007;Vescio et al., 2008) and professional learning communities have become a 'hot topic' in many countries (Stoll et al., 2006).Towards this end, Parkinson et al. (2020) have recently developed an academic community development model for unbinding academic development from institutional settings.
The aim of this article is twofold.First, we provide an example of a formal academic development program in the form of an interorganizational and international course conceived and structured as community development.We share our experiences and learnings from participating in and organising the course over the past ten years.Second, we provide evidence of the course's efficacy for individual participants from a prospective cohort study using a pretest-posttest design.That is, in addition to describing the course and its development and practice, we aim to answer the following research question: Does the course enhance participants' digital competences and online teaching skills?

The open networked learning course
Open Networked Learning (ONL) is an open online academic development course for educators in higher education on the topic of online collaborative learning, open education, and course design (www.opennetworkedlearning.se).ONL is an adaptation of the Flexible, Distance, and Online Learning (FDOL) course (https://fdol.wordpress.com/) that is offered by a network of universities in Sweden, Finland, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, and Germany.Next to the institutional learners from the partner universities, up to 25% of the available spots in the course are offered to open learners.ONL is therefore an open educational practice (Koseoglu & Bozkurt, 2018) resulting in participation from an additional 25 countries.It has been offered 17 times since 2014 with up to 120 participants in each iteration.The course aims to increase participants' knowledge, skills, and abilities to reflect on online teaching and learning aspects.These competences have been identified as crucial for successfully integrating technology in teaching (Koehler & Mishra, 2009) for blended and fully online courses.
A learner can engage in ONL in three ways: as an institutional participant from one of the partner universities, an open learner, or an independent learner.Institutional participants and open learners are grouped into problem-based learning (PBL) groups, the most prevalent and collaborative method of participation in ONL, with an expected workload of about 80 hours over 12 weeks (equivalent to three European Credit Transfer System [ECTS] credits).The groups comprise seven to eight members and are guided by a facilitator and a co-facilitator as they explore diverse scenarios related to the course topics.Independent learners can engage through connected individual blogs, synchronous course sessions such as webinars and tweetchats, or asynchronously through interaction on social media using the course hashtag.The facilitator is involved in the planning and administration of the course and, rather than serving as a teacher, helps participants to collaborate effectively.The facilitator records participants' activity, monitors progress, and follows up as necessary.The facilitator is responsible for the PBL group and is expected to ensure that all participants feel included and that the work proceeds smoothly.The co-facilitator's role is that of a mentor who has recently taken the course and understands how the participants feel.They are expected to share insights on how they tackled problems in the course work, offer advice and empathy, and support participants as an approachable contact person.They also comment on the group work and the participants' reflection posts.Co-facilitators are not responsible for course administration but are there to provide support to the participants and the facilitator and often participate in the course on a volunteering basis.

Course organisation, design, and learning environment
The course is organised by the course organisers, a mixed group of educational developers made up of staff from the partner institutions, as well as previous participants, who continue their involvement in ONL as volunteers for continued competence development and to be part of the community.The team of course organisers forms the core planning group of ONL and comprises four to seven members who meet weekly.Each partner university provides at least one facilitator and an institutional representative, who is formally responsible for their participants and administration (admittance, awarding certificates, etc.).Together with the co-facilitators and other volunteers, they form the ONL course team, which can include up to 45 people for large course iterations.The ONL team meets weekly or biweekly and serves as a platform for knowledge exchange and collegial support.Recently, sub-teams have been formed that take on different functions to support open learners, alums, or questions regarding educational research related to ONL.
The course design follows the five-stage model of Salmon (2013) with an initial twoweek acclimatisation period to allow learners to become comfortable with the course platforms and get to know their PBL group.Afterwards, four two-week blocks with different topics continue, in which the main PBL work is conducted and followed by the final week of reflection.One week of individual reflection is scheduled in the middle of ONL to allow participants to catch up on assignments and reflect on the first half of the course.For each period or block, one course organiser takes on responsibility and makes sure that the PBL scenario and learning resources are updated.This is often done in collaboration with an additional ONL team member and international experts, who are invited to hold a one-hour webinar and/or tweetchat for the four modules.
ONL uses open technology (Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2008) as much as possible.Instead of using an institution's learning management system (LMS), the course homepage and digital learning environment are built on a locally hosted WordPress multisite (Avila et al., 2016) at one of the partner institutions.WordPress is an often-used platform in networked learning (Cronin et al., 2016) and provides a technically advanced system for teaching and learning.The open-source software can be adjusted to meet educators' needs with relatively few resources and enables us to provide each participant with their own reflection portfolio (Slepcevic-Zach & Stock, 2018) as well as each PBL group with their own collaborative group space (Donelan & Kear, 2023).The main course homepage, which is openly available to the broader public, provides all course information, dates, learning resources, and individual reflections of participants.Additionally, there is a space for the entire course iteration in which participants and ONL team members can interact.PBL group spaces and the course community space require a user account and log in.Thus, the course adopts a layered approach to openness and participants can decide how openly they want to share.

A pedagogy for community building
The pedagogical cornerstones of ONL are PBL (Dolmans et al., 2005) and learnercentred theories for online networked learning (Blaschke et al., 2021).In the context of ONL, PBL is regarded as an approach and enabler for community building (Nerantzi & Gossman, 2015) and learning as a constructive, self-directed, collaborative, and contextual process (Dolmans et al., 2005).This is done to highlight learner agency and to provide opportunities for learners to tailor their learning experiences to their individual needs (Blaschke et al., 2021).ONL is particularly inspired by Connectivism (Siemens, 2007) and the first connectivist courses like CCK08 or PLENK (Downes, 2008).At the same time, we try to mitigate the challenges that such courses can entail for participants (Kop, 2011) regarding confusion and feeling overwhelmed in several learning spaces.A more detailed description of the learning activities of ONL is presented in Nerantzi (2014) and Creelman et al. (2021).
Online networked learning has been frequently studied using community frameworks (Conole et al., 2011), such as Community of Practice (CoP; Wenger, 1998) or Community of Inquiry (CoI) (Garrison et al., 1999).Learning in communities has been described as the 'holy grail of online learning' (Jan et al., 2019, p. 250).However, not all communities share the same qualities.Henri and Pudelko (2003) present an analytical framework to analyse activity and learning in online communities.Four different communities are distinguished: community of interest, goal-oriented community of interest, learners' community, and community of practice.These communities differ in terms of the strength of the social bonds of the members and the strength of the community's intentionality.Of particular interest in our context is the difference between the learners' community, which Henri and Pudelko argue relies upon the teacher, and the CoP, which requires a commonality regarding shared profession or working conditions.In ONL, there are several communities within and across iterations of ONL.The smallest in size are the different PBL groups in each iteration, and the largest is the entire community of all participants, which resembles a learners' community.Especially in the first weeks of the course, the participants rely to a greater extent on the facilitator.At later stages in the course, the facilitators take a more passive role and fade back their active involvement (Hmelo-Silver & Barrows, 2006).On the other hand, the ONL course team resembles a CoP; some of the ONL course team members have been involved in the course since 2014 and there is a continuous inflow of new team members.There are more than 80 members in the community and we have many old-timers and newcomers (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in each iteration.

Openness and onboarding of new (co-)facilitators and new institutions
Another cornerstone of the course is its openness.Openness and open education include open educational practices, and formal and non-formal learning experiences (Weller et al., 2018;Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020).Openness and open education have the potential to promote social justice (Bali et al., 2020); for instance, by enabling and enhancing the participation of marginalised groups.In the context of ONL, openness is implemented in multiple ways.The most obvious is the provision of spots in facilitated PBL groups for open learners, who can participate free of charge and independently of their institutional affiliation, even if they are not affiliated with a HEI.Another attempt is the cultural diversity of partner institutions from South African, South East Asian, and European HEIs.Other more-imperceptible practices include a course design that deemphasises high-quality video and synchronicity, and in this way is more accessible to those with lower bandwidth.
The openness of the course also helps in onboarding new members to the community.Mechanisms for onboarding new members are fundamental for building and sustaining online communities (M. A. Bond & Lockee, 2014).For participants in the course, onboarding (i.e.enrolment in the course) takes place through the partner institution for institutional participants and through the course homepage for open learners.The onboarding process of new facilitators takes at least three iterations.After participating and returning as a co-facilitator next to an experienced facilitator in the second iteration, team members can take on the facilitator role if they feel ready.This mirrors the onboarding process for new organisations, as each organisation is required to provide at least one facilitator.

Materials and methods
To evaluate the efficacy of ONL, we conducted a voluntary prospective study of two consecutive iterations of the course in 2020 that, with individual consent, examined ONL participants' perceptions and attitudes toward their online teaching skills before and after the course.The study was approved by the local non-medical ethical committee at University of Oldenburg.As a measurement instrument, we used the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu; Redecker, 2017), an online questionnaire that can aid educators to assess and develop their own digital competence.DigCompEdu entails 22 competencies, organised into six areas of competence to support educators' digital competences at different levels.It builds on a model of professional growth using six levels of proficiency: Newcomer, Explorer, Integrator, Expert, Leader, and Pioneer.
Attrition is a common challenge in panel surveys, to which our study was not immune.Initially, 238 participants were invited to participate, but response rates decreased over time.Out of the 101 participants who completed the questionnaire before the course and the 68 who responded after the course, we were able to link the pre-and post-course survey data for 48 participants, forming the basis of our analysis.Thirty-three percent of the final sample were men, and 90% had been involved in teaching for more than four years.However, it is important to acknowledge that attrition poses limitations to the generalizability and validity of our findings.The reasons for attrition can vary and include time constraints, lack of interest, and external circumstances.Despite efforts to minimise attrition through reminders and communication, the actual sample size was rather small compared with the intended population and may have introduced biases and impacted the representativeness of our results.We compare means in pre-and post-periods using t-tests and visualize findings using modified Brinley plots (Youngstrom & Langfus, 2019).

Results
The pre-and post-course survey data for the 48 participants show a clear increase in the overall DigCompEdu score and in each of the six subscales.Table 1 summarises the results of paired t-tests and shows that average overall score increased from about 65 to 72.5, which is 7.5 points on a scale from 22 to 88 (p = .0001).Thirty-seven out of 48 participants increased their overall score.In addition, Table 1 shows the average score of all six sub-scales increased (all ps < .05).
To visualise participants' progress, Figure 1 presents a scatter plot, designed as modified Brinley plot (Youngstrom & Langfus, 2019), depicting the individual participants' pre-course vs. post-course scores in each of the subscales.The data points falling above the dotted diagonal line (y = x) indicate higher scores post-course compared to pre-course for a clear majority of participants.This visual confirmation aligns with the quantitative findings, offering visual evidence of the widespread improvement in participants' perceived skills across multiple facets of digital education.However, it is crucial to acknowledge that a non-negligible proportion of participants did not experience improvement or even witnessed a deterioration in their perceived skills.

Discussion
In the following section, we discuss our experiences and learnings from participating and organising the course over the past ten years, as well as the results from the prospective cohort study.

Community development in and through ONL
ONL was designed from the outset with a clear focus on community building.Next, we relate ONL to the recently proposed model of academic community development (Parkinson et al., 2020).The model consists of three dimensions, each being a dialectic between two opposing ends: community-focused versus individual-focused; alleviating versus transformative; and needs-based versus assetbased (see Figure 2).The rather straightforward individual focus is contrasted with the community focus, which requires paying attention to the community's 'common interests ' (p. 197).ONL has a shifting focus between the community and the individual participants.For instance, ONL is an individual, professionaldevelopment activity for each participant and the course design allows for a lot of agency and self-determined learning.At the same time, ONL is an attempt to let the community of higher education teachers experience a collaborative form of an online course, which starkly contrasts with many experiences of higher education students (Donelan & Kear, 2023).Also, the provision of regular course team meetings, often emphasizing inclusion of participatory designs such as liberating structures (Torbert, 1978), ensures that the community's voice is heard and implemented.
An alleviating focus aims at building community capacities to enable people to care for their own needs or give them more say in planning services within existing power relations and social structures.Contrary, a transformational focus involves actions that aim to transform society by strengthening critical analyses, challenging power holders, and mobilising against government policies to redistribute power and resources.We argue that ONL focuses on both aspects.While ONL is designed to help individuals raise their digital competencies to be more versatile in course design and online teaching, practicing and proliferating open education can also be regarded as transformational (Bali et al., 2020).Thus, the emphasis is context dependent.The focus of community development is more transformational in countries where 'opening up' higher education, by providing access through open educational resources (OER) and practicing open education, is groundbreaking.
Needs-based approaches assume a resource deficit and seek to identify, and subsequently meet, a community's needs by accumulating resources.In contrast, asset-based approaches identify and leverage the tangible and intangible resources (assets) the community already possesses.Again, it is difficult to clearly distinguish an orientation in ONL towards one or the other.In the PBL groups and the entire course community, there is an ongoing process of mapping and articulating needs and sharing resources in the form of practices, articles, and other resources.

Efficacy of the ONL for individual participants
Our study provides evidence of the efficacy of the ONL in enhancing participants' digital competences and online teaching skills.The results indicate an increase in participants' overall DigCompEdu scores and in each of the six subscales, demonstrating a significant improvement in their perceived skills and abilities.This is important.Professional development in digital competencies has been repeatedly called for, and such calls have been recently renewed (Bond et al., 2019).However, it is important to acknowledge that a small subset of participants did not exhibit improvement or even experienced a decrease in their perceived skills.While this highlights the diverse range of experiences and outcomes among participants, it also underscores the need for ongoing support and tailored interventions to address individual learning needs.Another explanation is that the answers of the small subset of participants could be due to a response shift bias (Howard & Dailey, 1979); participants could have changed their conceptual understanding of online teaching and learning during the course, leading them to evaluate their skills differently.Therefore, future studies of ONL should consider retrospective pretests to examine students' subjective experiences (Hill & Betz, 2005).

Sustainability and evolution of the ONL approach -what have we learned
The ONL approach of designing an open online faculty development course as an international community of practice has proven to be a successful and sustainable example of an interorganisational course.CoPs for academic development have recently sparked much interest (Jan et al., 2019) and have been particularly called for regarding the use of technology in teaching (Bond et al., 2019).Next, we would like to offer our learnings and experiences from participating and organising ONL through the years.We connect these to the 12 tips for implementing a CoP for faculty development (de Carvalho-Filho et al., 2020), with which we concur.

Gather a core group, have clear goals, and make it concrete
Essential for ONL was forming a core group of academic developers from various HEIs who are 'networkers by heart'.This core group combined competence, experience, and passion for and with online collaboration, networked learning, and PBL.Being open to new ideas and aware of the complexity of academic development, the core group is capable of, and recognises the importance of, creativity and communication.The goal for ONL has been to address the urgent need for academics to experience first-hand online PBL and open networked learning (Dolmans et al., 2005;Downes, 2008;Weller et al., 2018;Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020).This could have been done in a regional or national context, but the vision, goal, and value of ONL was to provide an international learning experience from the onset (Creelman et al., 2021).In ONL, the community is the course and the course is the community (Cormier, 2008).Offering the course in international collaboration provides a specific 'problem to solve' and keeps the community aligned and current.To run a CoP integrated with a course, it is essential that the pedagogical principles are aligned with a community approach.

Keep the CoP open and invite new members
ONL is open in name and in practice.The course is an OER and available for reuse.
We continually express open invitations to join as a collaborating institution, as a member of the ONL course team, or as an independent or open learner (Weller et al., 2018;Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020).The course design is also open and allows for learner-centric practices with the potential for social justice (Bali et al., 2020).Through the years, many renowned experts in educational development and online learning have contributed to webinars or tweetchats.Moreover, the ONL course team frequently shares innovative practices in meetings and online collaboration spaces.Participants also practice this in their reflective portfolio and in the course community space (Stasewitsch et al., 2022).We join Zawacki-Richter et al. (2020) in their 'call to action for local and global parties to exploit the benefits of openness in education' (p.329).

Choose a facilitator and make it worthwhile for all stakeholders
The facilitators are often mentioned by participants and appreciated in course evaluations.They are the backbone of the course.As the main contact persons for participants in the PBL groups, their facilitation skills are essential for a fruitful learning experience (Hmelo-Silver & Barrows, 2006).They also encourage dedicated participants to join the ONL course team, thus ensuring the renewal and sustainability of ONL.
ONL is worthwhile for individual participants, the ONL course team, and the partner institutions.Individual participants can participate in an international online course in which the vast majority of participants value and perceive to increase their digital competencies.Through ONL, the course team members increase their personal learning network (Oddone et al., 2019), which reflects 'a large, diversified and significant network [that] is the educational developer's greatest asset' (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2008, p. 166).Additionally, the partner institutions have access through the course to a large international network and ONL provides a fully online, learning by doing, faculty development course that is almost impossible to replicate in individual institutions.
Perhaps the most challenging part in running ONL is, surprisingly, institutional support.Despite the many advantages of participating in ONL, some institutions regularly report that the costs of participating are too high.Institutional partners are required to provide a facilitator for every six institutional participants.This has led some institutions to view the course as expensive compared with other courses in their portfolio.Heads of educational development units as well as participating academic developers need to understand the benefits of the course and its uniqueness; however, this can be difficult if they have not experienced ONL.

Evaluate the CoP and communicate success
As a course, ONL is evaluated regularly at the end of each iteration using a course evaluation questionnaire.At ONL course team meetings, we collectively discuss and assess the learning processes of individuals, the dynamics in the PBL groups, what the community needs, and how we should further develop ONL.This study is another example of how we evaluate the course and attempt to be reflective practitioners.Some community aspects have also been studied (Saadatmand et al., 2017).Using the CoI framework, that study showed, amongst others, that participants in the iteration had high social presence (M = 4.12, SD = 0.53, on a five-point scale).In CoI, social presence is 'the ability of participants to identify and project themselves socially and emotionally in a community' (p.63).
After each iteration, success is celebrated within the PBL groups, the course community, and the ONL course team.For example, the final webinar focuses on the best experiences of the course and PBL groups share memes or other positive outcomes or situations during the course.The course organisers have also presented ONL on different national and international conferences, such as the Open Education Week, ICED, EDEN, OER20, and Swednet.

Limitations and future research
The pre-post design unfortunately limits the possibilities to draw strong conclusions from our study.A randomized controlled trial is the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of educational treatments and should be opted for in future studies.In addition, future studies of ONL could use retrospective pretests (Hill & Betz, 2005) to evaluate a potential response shift bias.We also call for more longitudinal approaches to assess the long-term impacts of the course on teaching practice (Ödalen et al., 2019).

Conclusion
In conclusion, the findings of this study support the effectiveness of the ONL course in enhancing participants' digital competences and online teaching skills.The course serves as a valuable academic development opportunity for educators in higher education to facilitate their integration of technology into teaching practices.These results contribute to the growing body of evidence on the positive impact of open online courses in fostering educational competences and highlight the importance of continued research and refinement of pedagogical approaches to meet the diverse needs of participants.ONL is one answer to calls for more CoP in higher education (Bond et al., 2019), which we would also like to see and hope to inspire.While Cronin et al. (2016) noted that 'nurturing global collaboration and networked learning in higher education requires significant effort and commitment' (p.11), we agree and add that the effort is worth the while.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Modified Brinley plots of pre-and post-scores across DigCompEdu categories.

Table 1 .
Digital competence of educators: mean scores before and after the course.