Now it’s time to sum up the course. It’s crazy how time flies, I’m looking back at the very first blog post I wrote in mid-February and it feels like ages ago… My PBL group looked back at lessons learned and our achievements as a group is found in this presentation. Here are my personal reflections and thoughts on the course.
In the beginning I was curious and eager to learn more about what all this course was about, but I experienced a lot of confusion and frustration. I couldn’t see the logic in the structure on the course page, I had a major information overload and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I had a constant feeling of stress. Time management has been an issue throughout the course, which hit me hard especially in the beginning. This was also because of private reasons and problems of fitting the group meetings in to my morning schedule, as our meetings took place at 9am Finnish time. Luckily, I attended this course in the spring term – my work load is so much heavier in the autumn term. I’m sure I couldn’t have completed this course any other time of the year. Attending an online course myself has also clearly given me more understanding of the reality of student life of today, especially when being a student with a full time job and family life in the same time!
When I think of it, there’s been a lot of issues, and lessons learned, around communication in general. I have attended a lot of webinars before, but never really been forced to interact this much. Attending these online meetings has been a new experience and I’ve become more confident in communicating effectively in online and virtual rooms. As a Swedish speaking Finn, English isn’t my first language, which has demanded a lot of extra time for reading, thinking, writing, discussing, understanding. Getting to know the other group members also took it’s time. We should have focused more on this part already in the beginning, introducing ourselves also on a private level and not being so strictly professional. For me it’s very natural to get to know the person behind the professional title as well, especially when you’re meeting twice a week. At an early stage I was also thinking about this and I missed this part, but I thought it’s a cultural thing that everyone isn’t comfortable with sharing so I didn’t bring it up. Later on it appeared that also others in my group had been thinking about this.
In the library world we are using different e-tools a lot as most of the research is available online today. The library staff of today must be up-to-date, and have an interest, on what’s happening in the e-world. So in this sense, using technology in my own work is not a new thing. This course has on the other hand truly taught me a lot on pedagogical theory and pedagogical concepts, such as “scaffolding” (which doesn’t seem to have a Swedish translation?)
I work a lot with teaching information searching for our students and library patrons but I have never really regarded myself as a “real” teacher. Maybe because I don’t have a degree in pedagogy, or maybe because I’m not fully responsible for any courses on my own. My teaching is always integrated in other teachers courses and is depending on their content and their demands. It has bothered me for a while, not really being able to follow up what happens next in the students minds and works, and if they actually learned something from the session I held for them. I hope I could improve this part in my work, and become more present in their studies. I do not really know how, yet. Visiting Zoom meetings twice a week for the last three months has however inspired me to open an online room for our library. I hope this can help our online students to get faster and better help with their questions.
It’s funny and fascinating, how one actually can collaborate, with a bunch of total strangers, from all kinds of corners of the world, and in a relative short time produce common presentations with digital tools only some or none of the group members are familiar with from before. In this sense the course is really amazing, and has opened up a complete new world and network for me.
In my PBL group we’ve been mostly focused on the output, which we in the end could say wasn’t the best priority. However I’m really proud of what we achieved and I’m happy that all of us stayed with us until the end. A PBL group without dropout seems to be quite unusual? I’m sure all of us has learned new things and we are actually planning on continuing our group meetings and communicating through a common hashtag #ONL191PBL6.
I’m truly grateful for this challenging experience, thank you.
