Last week of the ONL course. It seems like ages ago that we started, yet time has flown by. It is time to reflect what I’ve learned and how it will influence my personal learning networks and environments.
First and foremost I want to thank my colleagues in PBL11. We had some great discussions over the past months. I feel we had the “coffee room chats” I was missing from being on campus. We all had knowledge of different things and shared that and helped each other as much as possible.
One thing I’ve learned is that most of us are struggling with the same things. It is impossible to make everyone happy no matter how hard you try. Especially in large courses with hundreds of students. I’ve learned some new tools, like thinking, paddle and so on. Some of them I will definitely use, but I’ve also realized that the tools I am using are pretty good. In our group we discussed a lot about law, and what is allowed to use in different Universities. Turns out, if we want to be on the safe side, there are not a whole lot we can use.
Before this course I had been wondering how often I should renew my videos. I teach a subject that doesn’t change. I realized on this course that a lot of the material was 10 years old, and that is regarding a subject that is changing very rapidly, so I do feel better about my three year old videos, I’ll give them a couple more years.
Living in the US, it wasn’t always easy to attend the live webinars, and I found it great that they were recorded so I could watch them later. Being a global course, it would have been nice to have some of them later in the day, but I understand it isn’t always possible.
Working only eight hours a week on the ONL was next to impossible. We were meeting with the PBL group for 2 hours, then there was the personal blog, articles, videos, webinars, etc to take part of. Sometimes I would have preferred to not “hassle around” with so many things at once, but instead been able to focus some more on the topic by for example deeper discussions within the PBL group.
The webinars as well as the PBL meetings were my favorite part of the course. I did feel we often were a bit stressed to get the presentation done in the group, and would have liked the group meetings to be more relaxed and “open” to discuss the topic we had instead of focusing on the end product.
Overall it has been an interesting course, very different from anything I have attended before. I think I need some time to decompress after this, but I am sure I will go back to the material and use some new strategies in my own teaching. I will also check out more of the other participants blog posts and presentations. I felt I didn’t always have enough time to do that now.
