I am very grateful for having the possibility of joining this ONL212 course with members of my PBL group. And I am very glad that I did not start before Covid accelerated digitalization. The experiences of online teaching and digital meetings during these last two years of the pandemic have positively influence my learning during the ONL212 course. Due to the collaboration within my PBL group and webinars, as well as my own reading and reflection on different recommended resources, my insights into learning design have become both deeper and broader.  

In this last reflection we are encouraged to think about What are the most important things that you have learnt through your engagement in the ONL course? Why? and What suggestions do you have (activities and/or in general) for development of eLearning in your own teaching or context? 

As a part of my answer to these two questions, I want to mention the five-stage model developed by Gilly Salmon (2013); it was a real eye-opener for me which helped explain some of my experiences.  In this model the first stage is about Access and motivation with a focus on ‘Setting up system and accessing’   and ‘Welcoming and encouraging’.  In a country such as Sweden with a high level of digitalization and with a lot of discussions on the social media gap between generations, one can assume that students do not need so much support with accessing information and materials available on the LMS.  But during courses that I was responsible for, many students were wondering about the information which, in my view, was clearly provided on the Canvas side for the course.   In my teaching experience, the importance of this first stage is rather underestimated. We expect that students will easily find all the information provided on LMS. Of course, it is not the case. I will try to increase awareness of importance of this stage in my teaching group. This stage is even more important within eLearning.  

I want also to mention here my insights about collaboration and group working.  As one of the focal points of the ONL course was collaboration, my PBL group had many discussions about collaboration and groupwork. It was really rewarding to take part in research about group work. My blog reflection for topic 4 is about that. 

What are you going to do as a result of your involvement in ONL 212 ? Why?

My opinion is that education is not going to transition back to the time before covid; instead, education will transition to a post-covid teaching-style with increased blended learning.  Accordingly, the topics of the ONL212 course will influence my practice in many ways. I want to work in cooperation with my colleagues and other resource within my PLN to develop and implement activities for the following points that can support students and teachers in their teaching and learning processes:

On the course level 

• Activities for ‘Check in to the course’  as a part of the first stage of the five stage model in order to increase motivation and to get all students involved in the course.
• Activities for ‘Check in to the group work’ as an important condition for a good collaboration and cooperation within group work.
• Activities for ‘Check out of the course’ to increase students’ reflection and to increase students’ willingness to complete evaluations of courses.
• Activities for ‘Check out of the group work‘ to increase students’ reflections on the development  of their collaboration skills and awareness on what they have learned. 
• Make the weekly workload visible and clearly for students to motivate students and to increase retention.

On the program level 

• Personal Learning Network (PLN) among students and teachers: I plan to discuss with others teachers about the concept of Personal learning Network (PLN ) and how we can motivate  students to use their  time at the university  to build their PLN. The concept of PLN can be also used for encouraging students to collaborate within groupwork tasks. 

And my final reflection

This course ONL focuses on teachers as the target group. Of course, one can assume that we have different levels of teaching experience, but all of us have at least a degree and some teaching experience. Our learning in this course was mainly organized within PBL groups and focused on collaboration. We were 6 persons in our PBL group. Beyond resources provided on the ONL platform and webinars, we had two facilitators joining and supporting us at each PBL groups meeting. 

It strikes me that our students usually do not get the same level of support that we received and we expect them to collaborate and work with different group tasks.  Actually, the lack of facilitating student groups meeting was discussed during the final webinar. 

References

Salmon, G. (2013) The Five Stage Model. Homepage