On August I got an email from my university about available pedagogical courses, and ONL cought my eye. After the benji-jump into online teaching on spring 2020, I was eager to learn how it actually should be done. It also sounded very reasonable to study online learning in an online-course and the very international approach sounded really good to me as well.

I indeed really liked studying with our PBL group, that was definitely the best part of the course. We had very good conversations with our diverse group – we were from four continents and all from different fields – and I learned a lot from the group. And it was fun!

Another aspect I very much enjoyed was how well the course itself was organised. That is naturally always an asset for a student, but in the case of ONL the course itself also functioned as an excellent example of what online learning could be as it’s best. For example, there was the important getting started week when we could concentrate on the practical arrangements without having to worry about content, there were our excellent facilitators and there were all the various tools offered to us smoothly but still so that we could not escape them – like this blog-writing.

But now the course is finished and it’s time to think what I have learned and how I can use it my future work.

Firstly, I’m going to continue writing this blog. Setting up one had actually been my plan for at least three years, but I couldn’t just get it done. I’m therefore really happy that we needed to do that in the course, and I already selected the name so that I could write also about my subject area in here. I think the content could vary from textiles to education and from study materials to just-for-fun writing.

Secondly, I definitely now have more tools than before to develop my online and blended-learning courses and I’m going to use them. I’m already planning to use the five-stage-model to some degree at least.

Thirdly, I’m probably going to use more different technologies in teaching and what’s even more important – I’m going to remember how easy it actually is to learn a new tool when you need one. Contemporary tools are indeed very easy to use, each have their pros and cons of course, but getting started seems to be always quite straightforward.

And, lastly, I’m going to keep in touch with our PBL group as it’s not often you get to know new people from different fields and different sides of the globe at once.