This year has been interesting, to say the least, both for online learning in general and for my personal experience with it.

Covid-19 has defined anything and everything this year, and it has accelerated the process of moving material online in many countries, institutions, and workplaces. In some places this has worked really well, while other places struggle severely. The inequalities already reflected in some of the access to education around the world have in places intensified, while in other places they have changed. Germany, for example, my home country, was not at all prepared for the digital challenges of teaching students at home. Sweden coped with this particular aspect of the pandemic much better. So the question of access has become even more important, even for countries who may have before felt that they were quite well prepared for digital access.

In addition, blended learning has often not been possible, so the challenges that I discussed in my last blog post were even further accelerated. How can we sustain social contact when we can only meet online? This has been a challenge both for teaching but also for general social contacts. Personally, I feel that we have learned that a lot is possible online, that turning on cameras helps (if the internet connection is stable–and that is a big if), but also that nothing can replace actual physical encounters in spaces. Bearing in mind, however, that we will hopefully be able to meet again IRL at least in our social spaces, the barrier of wanting to learn to work in digital spaces has decreased for many people this year, I think. Especially older generations, who may have before felt excluded from digital contexts, may now have become more familiar with these, which also lowers the barrier to participate in online learning offers for this group.

My personal passion for teaching and digital learning design comes from the hope that one day education will actually be accessible to everyone. This to me seems the most important democratic endeavor. We are still a long way away from this, so there is much to work for still.

My own personal learning journey in this course has been substantial. I took the course over a year ago, and learned a huge amount especially in terms of using digital tools. As the second change this year for me personally was a change in my professional life, these learnings have been extremely valuable to me. I finished my PhD 2019 and decided to apply my skills in new contexts, which means that I left academia (if only partially as I continue to research) to work in a small change management agency. I now design learning for larger and smaller organizations and am constantly involved in developing e-learnings, facilitation, and change journeys. However, changing from faculty based teaching to teaching organizations has not at all been as big a change as I thought it would be. While the audience of my learning designs and sometimes also the purpose has changed, the paths and considerations in reaching that goal haven’t at all.

I have often returned to the resources that we worked with in the ONL course to remind myself of things to pay specific attention to. Engagement has been a crucial factor but in some projects also the idea of encouraging communities of inquiry. Change journeys in organizations require a lot of employee commitment and understanding, a willingness and openness to participate in the learning and change.

I have focused a lot on challenge (2) stimulating interaction and challenge (4) fostering an affective learning climate (challenges described by Boelens, De Wever, and Voet, 2017) in my work this past year. Often the issue with organizational learning is that learners feel that they have to do this on top of an already challenging workload. By signaling clearly the relevance and importance to the specific learner and by designing online learning contexts that are interactive and often even fun, this challenge can be met somewhat. There are constantly new ideas of how to meet this challenge, so I have stayed in touch and tried to engage as much with my fellow community of teachers and learning designers to learn from their ideas.

The challenge of fostering an affective learning climate has been harder to work with. Often our learning designs do not include any direct interaction at all. However, my research that focused on literature, rhetoric and especially the rhetoric of affection in literature has been very helpful here. Already Aristotle suggested that visual rhetoric can be effective in creating a sense of caring and a sense of engagement in certain causes. We use this a lot in our learning designs by incorporating films and other visual elements. In our latest project, we included gifs of a stick person that experienced different situations. The sense of empathy and care that this visual created was coupled with self-reflection questions, which was meant to create a sense of empathy for the learner and others. Although initial feedback suggests that this was appreciated by learners, whether this was truly effective or not will need to be followed up once this project has been rolled out for a while.

On the whole, I cannot imagine a course that would have been more useful or thought provoking to me. I took it at exactly the right time both for the general developments in the world and for my private learning and career journey. I continue to read about related issues and to develop my own thoughts and skills in relation to online learning design, and I am incredibly grateful for the community of inquiry that this course has fostered.

/LM