Online participation plays an important role in successful online teaching and learning, and this has manifested in my engagement in the ONL211 course. My participation in accessing the online environments, attending webinars, writing of blogs, group discussion and collaborative work has honed my abilities as a professional in the field of education management and administration and I believe it will influence my practice positively in the future. I am now more digital literate; I am not only familiar with some of the online tools, but I have also mastered how to use them as some of these tools were used to present our group work.
ONL211 course was my first involvement in open leaning, and I have benefited tremendously from it through knowledge sharing taking place both withing and outside formal settings among the group members as we learn from each other’s experiences.
During the ONL course, I was exposed to collaborative learning. In my PBL group, we worked together and sometimes go into breakout sessions. I have learned that collaborative learning entails dealing with people with respect to highlight individual group members’ abilities and contributions. There was a sharing of authority and acceptance of responsibility among us as group members.
I have come to the realisation that in all forms of distance teaching, the ability to humanise the relationship with distant learners is vital. We cannot overemphasis the need to close the physical distance between the teacher and the students so as to reduce the psychological and emotional space. It is also of great importance to ensure that certain resources and tools required for smooth online teaching are in place. Coming from education management and administration background, resource allocation for online learning is key.
As much as It is ideal to have all resources in place, it must always be put into consideration that some institutions might find it practically unfeasible to allocate resources for all the online activities depending on the circumstances facing the institution. Situations such as large group sizes, unstable power supply and inadequate access to technology may impact negatively on effective allocation of resources.
Great lessons have been learnt and many benefits derived from enrolling for this course but despite these positives, there were challenges that I experienced as well, such as having to learn new technologies, differences in time zones for the group members and the most difficult one was blogging as I have never blogged before and my first blog was done during this ONL course. I am grateful to be part of ONL211 as most of the challenges have been turned to gains for me.
