After 12 weeks of international online collaboration, a very inspiring and informative course comes to an end. During the last topic of the course “Lessons learnt – future practice“, the participants got the chance to reflect about the different topics, activities, the group collaboration and the personal lessons learnt. Our group (Group 12) decided to summarise our contributions on a Thinklink page as a world map to visualise our common travel through the different topics. Seeing the full picture of our contribution in that way confirms for me how constructive, valuable and joyful our collaboration during the last weeks has been and I want to thank here all of the group members for their contribution to our discussions and activities as well as our facilitators for their outstanding support.

Reflecting on the collaboration in our group, I came to the conclusion that the diversity of our group regarding our subject background and role at our higher education institutes were not a barrier but an enabler for the constructive and creative work we did. In our daily work as researchers we are used to collaboration within our disciplines, whereas we also like to talk about interdisciplinary research and how it is necessary to encounter the complex challenges that lie in front of us. However, in most cases disciplinary academic boundaries and lack of funding opportunities restrict interdisciplinary collaboration. This course and especially the group collaboration was an excellent practical example, where those boundaries did not exist and creativity was facilitated by the diversity. It would be interesting to see, if a similar, problem-based approach could facilitate interdisciplinary research with comparable outcome.

Regarding challenges (in this case within the educational background) it was interesting to learn that the main challenges that we as educators face today were similar both from international and interdisciplinary consideration. This on the one hand justifies and emphasises the importance of a personal learning network (PNL, as discussed in topic 3) and on the other hand the significance of sharing and openness (as discussed in topic 2). The former also to keep pace with exponentially growing digital tools and the latter to adapt own educational competence and further develop pedagogical concepts and methodologies. For me personally, I was especially able to expand my view on those aspects and I believe that the main reason for that is that the course structure provided an appropriate mixture of theoretical pedagogical background in an applied digital environment. In fact, various of the discussed theoretical framework could be applied directly in this course (topic 4), in current course planning and teaching activities.

At the end of this inspiring journey, I also want to thank all course organisers for developing this excellent course concept and for hosting us participants in such a welcoming way.