What did I gain from ONL ? Looking back at my ONL journey with contentment, gratitude and a sense of accomplishment, I feel this course opened several channels that will keep on flowing for my entire academic career. Knowing how… Continue Reading →

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 […]

Despite it be the online environment or not, the assessments should always be aligned with the intended learning objectives and planned accordingly to assess higher order cognitive skills. The traditional view point of testing knowledge has shifted to assessing skills and application. In order to achieve this there are multitude of assessment techniques implemented. In […]

Collaboration is a skill. How can we facilitate students in developing this skill through collaborative learning? Collaborative learning is defined as “a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together,” (Dillenbourg, P.,1999).  and on simplified terms  as joint problem solving. Student collaboration has shown to improve outcomes if done […]

This week’s ONL topic shed light on the essential elements required for effective collaborative learning. In my PBL Group meeting, one of the members asked these questions: “What’s so wrong with “divide and conquer”? I’ve always done it this way… Have I been doing collaboration wrong all this while?” This made me think more carefully […]

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 […]

Open learning is a relatively new concept, which has changed the traditional perceptions on higher education from ‘reserved ‘ to more ‘widely available ‘ learning resources. In this movement Open Educational Resources are made available in public domains in order to promote accessibility of knowledge and resources to a wider global community. Open learning is […]

As I journeyed through Topic 2, two questions formed in my mind: Are my blog and social media posts considered OER? According to UNESCO (n.d.), OERs are “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, […]

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 […]