We have now come to the final week of ONL 221 and should take a peek into the future and reflect our learning. I must admit that it has been quite a journey, not always an easy one but fun and indeed learning. To participate in a PBL course like this requires a lot from the participant especially since everyone has also a busy working schedule. I consider myself very lucky since I had a very supportive and knowledgeable group. There was a feeling of community already in the beginning, this gave us a freedom to share our thoughts and questions more openly. We have shared experiences and also discussed each one´s professional environment. I feel that the group being very heterogeneous gave added value to the participants. It has been so interesting to hear teaching experienced from different field of study and from countries far away from each other’s. ONL experience also reminds me how hard learning is, even painful sometimes This experience makes me humbler in my role as a teacher.

The topic I believe I got most out of was week 4 designing an online or blended course. I already reflected this in my previous blog post, I was able to pick many useful ideas not only from my group but the reading materials and webinars as well. I enjoyed the collaborative learning week as well. We discussed many challenges again from many different perspectives which resulted to some useful hints to improve my own teaching work. Being a facilitator together with a very knowledgeable teammate for Open learning was also a very positive experience. From that week I am taking with me the use of a great tool, Hypothesis and also Miro which we have used in other assignments as well. We also tested some very useful group activities like campfire story or only talking with questions to get the REAL question. Those one I will use in my teaching.

I now understand the need to develop my skills in gamification because there is a connection between learning to be fun and gaming. This was widely discussed also in Whitton & Langan (2019) article. I will test with my colleague next autumn in our new online course.

In my work place, like in many others, the adoption of new learning technologies and tools that support blended or hybrid learning has increased. Therefore, we have been encouraged to educate ourselves. It´s cool that instructors previously resistant or indifferent to tools such as videoconferencing, team-based platforms, and virtual classrooms have come to rely on those tools as essential ingredients in their work. ONL helps to lower the barrier of using new tools and technologies.

Source:

Whitton N. & Langan M. (2019) Fun and games in higher education: an analysis of UK student perspectives, Teaching in Higher Education, 24:8, 1000-1013, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2018.1541885

#ONL221 Topic 5, Lessons Learned