I decided to take the ONL course since COVID made me realise – sadly – that i know nothing about online teaching. Myself, like many others, thought: ”What can be so difficult? We do exactly the same as we did in classroom – but now we will be on Zoom instead of an actual classroom.” Obviously, that was the wrong approach, and it felt like moving everything online exacerbated the pedagogic problems we already had, the flaws in the course design, but also added new problems.
Now, after the ONL course, i feel i have a much better, and different, perspective on how online learning should be. First of all, I see many more benefits, compared to be before, although i still believe that a ”perfect” course should have a blended learning design – because both online and ofline education have their own benefits, but also drawbacks, and thus should be used as complementary rather than opposite alternatives. But in the process, there needs to be a re-thinking of the course curriculum, learning outcomes, and focus of the course.
What i liked most about ONL was the fact that I worked and interacted with individuals from very different backgrounds and with various levels of experience with online learning, and i feel i learnt a lot from this diversity. It also made me realise how many tools are out there, as well as ways of organising/ moderating an online meeting. I loved the creativity of some of our group members! Before ONL, i had no idea about Miro, Paddlet, Story Dice, and all the others – and i am really glad I got to know them. There is definetely no shortage of tools to make online learning more fun / interactive, so there’s no excuse for that. I also enjoyed the fact that we all had to be moderators for a certain topic, I see that as a novel but also interesting training (since I’ve never done that before) , which should be used as well for our students perhaps?
On the other hand, the aspect of ONL which i had a bit of a struggle for, was exactly its openess – which , i guess, was part of the course purpose. I can see how this structure (or better said, lack of structure) can be a way of experimenting with different learning approaches, but it felt like the absence of clear requirements didn’t motivate me to work as hard as i would normally. I also felt like i’ve spent a lot more time and energy into deciding what to do , since we had so much freedom – but probably that was also a point of the course, to train us in doing that. As someone with slight ADD, lack of structure / not knowing exactly what is expected of me leads more often than not to lack of motivation, involvement and even more procrastination. And, to be honest, I sadly didn’t have the time I thought I could allocate for this course.
Nevertheless, I feel I learnt a lot, and I am glad I attented this course! And so, my two main lessons from this course are:
- With freedom comes responsibility and self-discipline!
- Online learning is NOT the same as remote teaching!
