At the very beginning of the ONL 191 course
I summarized my initial feelings about the course with THREE words: CONFUSION,
SCEPTICISM and CURIOSITY.
When I now, months later try to summarize and reflect upon what the important things I have learnt, two new words come up, one stayed: TRUST, LITERACY, CURIOSITY. I will try to take you through this journey and how it all happened.
The initial confusion was based on the fact that I could not see my role in the ONL 191 course. I tried to understand what I was supposed to do, perform and achieve and it was all very puzzling. The scepticism was based on my background as a medical doctor, researcher and teacher. I was quite traditional in the way that I have always taught my student in a classical classroom session although I was familiar with PBL and case-based teaching. Still, I was curious to see how I could increase my digital literacy during the course. So what happened during the course? Well, first of all, TRUST was built in the PBL group. Initially, I did not really look forward to the synchronous sessions because I was not sure that I could contribute to the group’s effort. Later, I actually looked forward to them and I was unfortunate to miss out on two occasions. The group had very good discussions and all participants were open to the fact that we came from all different backgrounds and had all different perspectives going into the discussions. Next, LITERACY. I must say that one of the best things about this course is that you expose yourself to new technical tools and force yourself to engage in twitter sessions, web-based meetings, different kinds of presentation tools and more. I was fascinated that I knew so little about the different tools that can be used for presentation, interaction and communication. Last, but not least, my CURIOSITY for modern teaching and web-based interaction and communication has increased during the course. I will take me with different aspects from the course and one that I would like to mention is the five stages model in online learning by Prof. Gilly Salmon. I think our group was a very good example of how we took each stage as we developed as a group. Of course I did not realize that we took those steps until the end of the course, corresponding to the fifth and last stage – reflection.
