In my blog on topic 1 I cited Herbert Simon who stated that learning is basically what learners think and do, there is nothing else. And according to Ambrose et al. (2010), learning is a process that encompasses change and has to be done by oneself. If I take these two statements and reflect this on my ONL learning experience, it becomes obvious that we did just this: Learning happens when we do something! Doing things is how we got good at anything that we are good at.

What the ONL211 core team did, is to figure out a way forward how they can collect people together who share a desire to learn something and then create a platform where they will DO something.

But learning is not as easy as it might sound, because the reason it’s hard is that learning involves changing your mind, changing your expectations, changing the way you see the world.

As ONL211 core team you need to find people who are ready and eager and committed to changing their minds. You need emotional enrollment of voluntarily deciding that you want to go somewhere and then make a commitment. Such an emotional enrollment can be maximized in various ways, e.g. paying money, peer support or connection to the facilitator. Since we did not pay extra money for this ONL, my emotional enrollment came purely from positive peer support and a great connection to our facilitators.

Lecturing might be a convenient version of teaching, but that does not mean it’s more effective for learning. Real learning effectiveness comes from student-centered, project-based and self-paced learning. Those three elements enabled us to discover how to change our minds. The hard work of ONL is the pedagogy committed to creating cohorts of people who want to go on this journey, creating peer pressure and peer support, creating an environment where learning is going to happen, because the right people are together working on the right stuff.

A key element for me as take home message is the fact that we as teachers, educators, learning facilitators etc. are not supposed to transmit knowledge by lecturing. But the purpose of a lecture only can be to set the stage for the learner to learn something by doing it. The purpose of the learning facilitator is to confront the learner´s security, to somehow knock them off what they thought they knew. Just with enough passion and care that they scramble to find new footing.

We as learning facilitators need to create interest in the prompt. And the purpose of the prompt is to create interest in the project. And the purpose of the project is for the learner to actually do the work, to learn something. And the learning comes from the doing.

Thank you ONL211 and PBL05. I learned a lot with you!