What have I learnt to take with me from this course? I it is a hard question to answer. In one way I could mention the many digital tools I have learnt to use, I could write about the group work and how fun it was to on a regular basis meet up with such nice people, the insightful webinars, or the takeaways from one of the topics. But I don’t think it is one of these things, I think it is rather a combination that builds up to a shift in mindset or perhaps confidence building from being part of a community. A community of higher education teachers interested in developing and reflecting on their teaching practices. Our daily work as teachers is often stressful, in many cases combined with high stake research and other obligations. In such settings, teaching tend to be what it has always been, until something pushes us into new directions, such as COVID-19 that forced us all into online teaching. Such abrupt, and time restrained, changes might not necessarily make us reflect over our approach to learning, we just implement new things. However, a course like ONL, that strives for creating a sense of community where we get together over cultural boundaries to discuss and reflect over our teaching practices, pushes us to think about how we teach, what tools we can use and why. I think that helps to build confidence in the ever-changing world of higher education. I hope we can all keep learning together.
Building a sense of community through ONL