What have I learned?

Certainly, a lot! Most importantly, I have improved my own digital literacy and my approach to collaborative work. For my digital literacy, it has helped to try different tools and get hands-on experience using them. To get an overview of the digital options is very beneficial for me to choose appropriate tools for my teaching and other work. Also, I feel more confident judging copyrights, relying on cc licenses to use others’ content, and to share my own material. Regarding collaboration, I have been amazed firstly, how well the large webinars and the group work went in ONL. This experience has made me more confident about online collaboration. Secondly, I have gained further valuable insights how to aim for real collaboration in the sense of real synergistic effects.

How will my learning influence my practice?

I will attempt to provide my students with learning opportunities regarding digital tools and imply more collaborative tasks in my teaching. eLearning is more within my scope of tools I consider, clearly.

My thoughts about using technology in my context

If I can overcome institutional reluctancies technology use holds many opportunities for teaching in my field. Clearly, I can use free tools particularly for active participation of the students in lectures for large groups. Also, I feel more confident using technology appropriately in science to support collaborations, for example.

What am I going to do as a result of ONL?

I will clearly use more digital tools in my general work and focus on collaboration as a learning objective for my students. Probably, I will let them do more active work and have them take a larger part of the teaching presence. This will likely change my teaching towards more active methods for the students.

My suggestions for development of eLearning in my teaching and context

Most importantly, we would need availability of suitable tools, permission and encouragement to use them. Also, facilitator training would be crucial. I furthermore loved the practice in some universities to explicitly teach staff as well as first-year students digital literacy. It would be great to implement this into our curriculum, too. I am preparing for a course to be conducted in Vet School and strongly consider to imply some blended learning parts using digital tools.

Overall, ONL has been a great experience and I am sure I will benefit from it a lot!