So we’ve come to the final week of ONL and it’s time to reflect
on the journey.

Exactly what I’m going to take out of this from a professional perspective and how I’ m going to apply what I’ve learned to my job, I have yet to contemplate and determine. I’ve definitely learnt, that’s for sure, and it’s been stimulating and eye-opening. But I need some time to reflect and assimilate everything and see where it’ll take me. 

For me, much of the learning has been about gentle, subtle
changes in the way I look at things, or adding a different perspective to
things I kind of knew about already, or deepening my knowledge on a particular
aspect.

So if I look back on the weeks and topics, here are a few
key points and learnings:

Weeks 1 and 2 were all about meeting our PBL team, meeting
the course coordinators, setting up our blogs etc. It was exciting to learn
that we are a geographically diverse PBL group.

I’d never heard of Trading Cards before and that was a great
tool to use for our first assignment in which we had to introduce ourselves.

Another thing I learnt in that first week or two was more
about Zoom. Although I had used it extensively for one-on-one meetings in my
previous job, I didn’t know about the breakaway room functionality – that’s
pretty cool for a discussion/webinar setting.

In week 3 we started with the more “serious” work and topic
1 was all about online participation and digital literacy. The concept of
visitors versus residents was new to me and I enjoyed reflecting on my own
personal digital literacy journey as I hadn’t really consciously tracked it
before.

Topic 2 focussed on open learning – sharing and openness.
MOOC is a term that gets bandied about quite a lot in the digital education
field, so it was great to learn a bit more about the world of MOOCs and
critically evaluate their place in education. I found it valuable to learn
about Creative Commons as using images and material found on the web is
something I’ve struggled with in the past, so it’s great to know that there is
a “safe” way of reusing material.

Topic 3 was all about networked collaborative learning. Here
I came across quite a number of new buzzwords and terms, such as personal
learning network (PLN), social loafing, community of inquiry (COI), etc.  These are things I’ve experienced or come
across informally before but didn’t necessarily know they were formal concepts
and it’s useful to now have definitions and names for them!

Topic 4 was probably the topic most closely related to my
current role as an instructional designer – design for online and blended
learning.  It was valuable to look at the
design principles in terms of my current environment and reflect on which we do
well, which ones we can do better, and which ones we don’t do at all.

Through all the topics, it’s been refreshing to use new
online tools (Coggle and Prezi) and I would love to explore them more – I feel
we’re only just touched the tip of the iceberg.

My group members really contributed to my enjoyment of ONL.
Each person brought their own flavour to the team. Initially we struggled a
little with getting everyone onboard and finding suitable meeting times.
Communication was a little fragmented between email, the ONL website and Whatsapp.
But we quickly settled in, agreeing on meeting times that suited everyone and Whatsapp
seemed to become our preferred, convenient method of communicating with each
other. I did not experience social loafing in our group. If members couldn’t
attend meetings or meet a deadline, they communicated this and made a plan to
catch up.

We have decided to keep our Whatsapp group going after the course has ended, and will share learning ideas and experiences in future. I really hope to meet my team members in person one day