Learning Diary instructions
One part of the course is writing a learning diary, which describes your work on the course, and especially how you learn as you work on the course materials. The focus of the learning diary should be in your own learning, and self-reflection. Please remember to work on the learning diary starting from the very first week of the course.
The learning diary can contain the following:
- Description of each learning task (learning sessions, exercises, self-study) you've done on the course. Remember to emphasize what you learned and how working on the material affected your own thinking. This sort of reflection is much more important than just describing what happened. A description does not give any information about what you learned, what you thought about, and how this has allowed you to reflect on your own knowledge.
- Any particularly important ideas, conclusions, eureka moments, and such you have during the course
- Time-keeping - a rough estimate of how much time you have used for the various learning tasks
- Feedback on the course - what you think worked well, what you think worked badly, what you think was especially important or irrelevant
An appropriate length for a learning diary is between 5 and 15 pages, depending on how broadly you wish to describe your learning and work on the course.
The learning diary is assessed using a rubric. You will use this rubric when peer reviewing other students' learning diaries, and it will also be the basis for the grading your diary.
If you want, you can further structure your learning diary using things like the Gibbs’ reflective cycle. The following web resources might be useful:
https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/nikander/opk.html (in Finnish)
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/contpolphil/files/2013/10/learning_diary.pdf
Learning diary assessment rubric Page