Honoured guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, my fellow colleagues… Credit: hotpot.ai image generator. As we come to the end of our 3 months of learning together, I just wanted to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude to 2 groups of people. First, thank you to the organisers of this ONL journey. It has been […]

The webinars and group discussions around this topic got me thinking about how I would like to create effective online/blended learning.  One of my group members introduced me to a new word: mechanisms (thanks Ziad!). As I understand it, mechanisms are the big-picture strategies which we use to achieve our goal. For some reason, as […]

Learning Communities in Theory From the start, this was always going to be an interesting topic to me! I am a strong believer in the power of collaborative learning (Smith & MacGregor 1992), and the thought of students coming together to share their varied experiences, germinate new ideas, and bring them to fruition fills me […]

Confusion at the start When I first read that we would be examining “Open Learning”, I had the impression that we would be discussing topics closer to “customised learning”, perhaps mostly due to the definition I Googled (see Fig. 1) but also due to articles such as Lewis (1986). Hence, I envisioned learning about how […]

Echoes of a “Gen X” childhood   I grew up at the end of the non-digital age (if a label was needed, Gen X would probably be nearest the mark). In my childhood, I remember my parents buying the first desktop computer for our home running on Windows 3.11 and we had to use a […]