Dear members of ONL201 and other readers of these blogs
The expectations in advance were miscellaneous. I had not too much information about the contents and aims of the course. It was claimed that the beginning will be somehow stressful and even messy. And so it turned out to be, as well. But we survived and then came the Covid -19 pandemia. Our country went “closed” soon thereafter and online working became a new normal.
I was lucky to become a member of PBL Group 3, a bunch a very clever and nice people who were ready to help and share their remarkable expertise related to online learning and several technical issues that were and still are peculiar to me. Problem Based Learning per se was not a problem, even vice versa.
It was soon easy to discover that there, in this group, was no need to be afraid of technical issues that we had to face frequently. Help was offered almost before it was even asked for. This, in fact, might be the most important lesson learned during this course. Even though technical issues related to various IT applications etc. should not prevent us from getting acquainted with the possibilities that are available. This would naturally require that technical assistance is also available quickly and easily. If we do not dear to try, we’ll lose the possibilities of technology and something will be missing in our repertoire of learning-enhancing tools.
Most probably I will be a much more brave in trying new tools to improve my students experiences and even learning in the coming academic year 2020-2021 and thereafter.
As mentioned already I have not been a great fan of technological solutions in my teaching, but this hopefully will change at least to some extent. It is almost certain that during the “post-corona” times, if there ever will be those times, online learning in various forms will gain remarkable growth soon. Teachers have been forced to learn and collect experience and the message from different parts of the learning society is very unanimous: online teaching and learning really works.
I will aim at remarkably expanding the use of online teaching in order to facilitate and even enhance learning to my students. A serious discussion should, however, be held in our university of applied sciences in order to decide when and what will be the role of face-to-face teaching and learning and what could and should be left to be done online. Blended learning must be implemented in a more comprehensive way to the everyday life of ours. The resources, especially the hours that teachers can invest in actual teaching, should be used as effectively as possible. This is a very big issue and scientific research as well as experience of teachers and especially the learners are needed to make sustainable decisions.
