And just like that, the ONL202 course has come to an end. When I think back over the weeks of new topic introductions, recommended readings and PBL group discussions, a couple of reflections and observations come to mind. First, the range of emotions experienced from the start to the end of the course.  This began […]

The article Designing a Community of Inquiry in Online Courses (Fiock, H (2020) The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 135-153) has been instructive to me. Terminology wise, as set out in the article, “social presence is a theory that explains the ability of people to present themselves as ‘real people’ […]

Initially, I was hard pressed to think of a personal (non ONL) occasion of collaborative learning that moved my own thinking forward. Perhaps because I was hung up on the “learning” aspect and was therefore considering only occasions where I am wearing a “student” hat, which is inevitably more restrictive. If I take a more […]

I had a very narrow understanding of what it meant to “be open” as an educator before embarking on this course. I didn’t view openness as a spectrum but rather two stark choices, either you were open (and I simply equated this with offering one’s course at a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) level) or […]

Prior to starting the ONL 2020 course, I was clearly in the camp of keeping my private life separate from my professional life. In my mind, that equated to not maintaining much of a professional digital presence online, and thinking about interactions with students in the traditional forms of contact through lectures, tutorials and personal […]

I’ve been an educator for the past 8 years and have loved discovering the various facets of teaching and learning. Having embarked on a new course to further my education, I will be documenting my learning as I go along…