So, the ONL201 course has started, the Connecting week is over, and it’s time to write my first blog post (of my life, actually). So far, everything has worked out fine. It is always nice to meet new people. Well, of course we haven’t actually ”met”, only talked to each other over the internet. Which obviously feels perfectly proper for our time, for both environmental and virological reasons (yes, it is almost hard to write a text today without mentioning corona).
Our facilitator Hans has told us that this is in a way a ”meta course”, a course about itself. Although this sounded a little strange at first, it makes a lot of sense, and for me it clarified matters somewhat. Reading about ONL beforehand made me a little confused: Lots of words about how the course was organized, but very little about what it actually contained. But now I understand that to some extent the form of the course IS the content. We will work in groups, coordinating our work using various digital tools, and in doing so, we learn to do just that. Slick!
The startup phase has given me (at least) two thoughts about my own teaching. The first one is that it is pretty traditional, far from modern ideas like PBL and online learning. I simply talk to my students in classical lectures, answering questions as they arise, and frankly, I love it! And according to the course evaluations, the students seem to appreciate it too. But even if I don’t feel an acute need for digitalization, I am a little curious about this new world of modern tools. And obviously, you cannot judge their usefulness unless you know something about them!
The second thought is about the theoretical underpinning of teaching. Reading (parts of) a recommended introductory text on PBL made me somewhat overwhelmed by the extensive discussion on learning theories and models. I rarely think much about such things in my everyday work. I do spend lots of time pondering ways to explain a tricky topic, what examples to give, what to leave out etc. But I suppose I do it in a practical way, without much connection to deeper learning theory. Is is unclear to me whether this is a problem. I guess everyone has some kind of, perhaps unconcious, learning theory, and as long as things work in the classroom, one can teach successfully without much reflection upon it. But at any rate, it cannot hurt to think a little about such things now and then.
So, to make a long story short, I look forward to the course!
