Dear ONL 201 organizers and facilitators, and the PBL team 11,

I want to express my gratitude to you for a great learning experience!

My goals to participate the ONL course were to experience a collaborative online course from the student’s perspective and get new ideas to improve my own teaching. These goals have been fulfilled and I am more than happy with the ONL course. Everything was organized in a professional manner. Furthermore, the structure and the materials of the course were excellent. Working in the PBL team was a great experience with the wonderful facilitators and study mates.

During the ONL course I have been working on revising my own courses. The timing was perfect, because our university are moving to a new LMS and some changes are needed anyway. The major revision that I made, was simplifying and streamlining the course design, and making the five stages more explicit to the students. To the introduction I added a short explanation of the pedagogical design to clarify why the course is designed in certain manner.

For me as a student, the most important learning experience was to understand how much time and energy you can invest in learning in the middle of your daily work and countless Zoom and Teams meetings. At the present, I mainly teach adults who have their jobs and families and hobbies in addition to the studies. I started wondering, does it really make sense to put a lot of pressure on the students to push them to do all the learning tasks, for which they possibly cannot invest enough time and energy? How could I possibly design more worthwhile learning experiences for the busy adults with different life situations?

During the ONL course I learnt that too heavy focus on the outcomes might hinder collaborative learning and drive the students just to share the work in order to produce the deliverables. For the teacher, of course, the deliverables are the concrete artefacts that can be used for assessment, because there is not much visibility in the group processes and discussions on normal online courses. Maybe, more sophisticated use of learning analytics and peer evaluation might be the tools supporting assessment.

In our PBL group, the best learning experiences for me were discussions with the colleagues from different countries and learning about their experiences and challenges. Warmest thanks also to our facilitators for being available and present in the zoom meetings and whatsup. Extra bonus to Per for being present in every single meeting.