“All good things come to an end,” my dad used to say when my kids wouldn’t have wanted to leave from summer cottage or other nice places. This came to my mind when ONL212 ended. 

The last blog post has been waiting for its arrival for too long, but better now than never. The last theme on ONL212 was “Lessons learnt – future practice.” The focus was on how would I get the best out of things I had learned during my journey with the PBL group and other ONL members. Since I write this blog post so much after the end of the course, I am not sure if my thoughts are exactly the same as in the middle of last December. Let’s not let it bother. I still have a lot of things to practice in the future.

It is hard to put things I have learned during ONL212 in line, but one of the most meaningful things has been the ability to use English in a professional context. I went back to my “old career” at the beginning of 2019 and had been on maternity leave and studying before that. The last time I worked on eLearning stuff, was in 2009 and I did very little anything in English. Since my early school years, I have thought that I am poor in English and would require a lot of studying to get to a level I could use the language in professional situations. I had heard and also repeated to my daughters that all it needs is the use of a language to get better at it. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed, or how? On this topic, I had to have an authentic experience before I really believed I could manage fully in English without total freezing on a discussion.

I know that learning a language is not the main point of ONL, but with my short story, I hope I can encourage others who try to nerve themselves to participate in the next iteration in spring 2022. The atmosphere in PBL groups and the bigger ONL group is safe and actually, most of the participants speak English as another language. Nobody judges you or laughs at others (this should be self-evident, but I still want to underline it) and there is always a possibility to use the time to find the right words and so on. This has been a healing experience to me in that sense. I even taught my first course in English at the end of 2021!

Every person comes from their own situations and background to ONL. If I had been a fluent English speaker, maybe other things had raised as the most valuable things to me. Of course, even now that I am some kind of an educational technology professional, the contents of this course were and still are valuable for me, and I learned a huge amount of new things from online collaboration, PBL, digital literacy and so on. So if you are familiar with these themes before the ONL course, I guarantee you still get a lot out of it! Please come and join us on the ONL221 iteration. Registration is on now!

I said “join us”, because I volunteered as a co-facilitator to this round and I must say I am quite excited! This is one step ahead on my journey to an international professional in online learning and education.

This is the way.

Picture: Dieterich01, Pixabay