It’s been an intense yet interesting experience for me participating in this Open Networked Learning course that focuses on online teaching over the past three months. At the beginning of the course, I must say that I felt frustrated given that the instructions were very confusing, the amount of information was huge, and the tasks we had to do for each topic were very complicated. After the first two topics, I then got a clearer picture of what was involved and expected in this course.

I have learned a lot, not only in terms of the online tools available for us, but more so in terms of pedagogical considerations for online teaching from new colleagues that I never met but surprisingly we ended up working together very well. In this final blog, I would like to reflect upon what I have learned and how I will move forward given that online teaching will be our new normal that instructors will have to face.

Most important things I have learned and they way my learning influence my practice

Besides the opportunities to try different online tools such as Padlet, Sutori, and Mural that my group used to create our presentations, I was fascinated by the fact that the course was well designed to make sure that the contents (or topics), the learning experience that participants would encounter, and the learning outcomes we achieved were in sync. In other words, I strongly believe that a good online class must be carefully designed and be pedagogically sound while technological tools are simply the instrument in teaching and learning. In other words, pedagogy should lead technology. Some of the key pedagogical concepts that I would certainly adopt in designing my future online classes include:

• Community of inquiry (Fiok, 2020)- I am fascinated by the fact that technology can even enhance students collaborations if the tasks are carefully designed. With the aim to foster more meaningful interactions in online classes, the course and learning tasks could aim at building a community of enquiry.
• Problem-based learning (PBL)– Throughout this ONL course, we went through several PBL scenarios that led us to collaborate in groups in order to complete our tasks (Barrett, 2010). This approach is one effective way in online teaching that reinforces the development of community of inquiry among students that I could model after.
• Teaching, Cognitive, and Social Presences (Fiok, 2020)- These three concepts become very useful for me as I start to realize how I should conduct myself in my online teaching in order to become an effective online teacher who can not only foster student learning but also present myself to students as a ‘real’ person online.

My future plan and suggestions for development of e-learning in my own teaching context

Even after the containment of COVID-19, I strongly believe that we will have to encounter a new era of teaching and learning and online instruction will become more prevalent. The following is a list of what I will start exploring for myself and future students:

• Compile open educational resources (OER) useful for my teaching and start to develop my own that I can share publicly with wider academic communities.
• Explore other online teaching approaches besides problem-based learning that could foster students collaboration on the virtual space.
• Conduct scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) research related to online teaching which can help me to become a more scholarly teacher.

References

Barrett, T. (2010). The problem-based learning process as finding and being in flow. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 47, 165-174. doi: 10.1080/14703291003718901.

Fiock, H. (2020). Designing a community of inquiry in online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 135-153. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.3985.