Prior expectations:

Thanks to our facilitators Sandeep and Karin at LTU, they briefed about structure and format of the new way of learning course. After reading through ONL website and orientation, I had few expectations;

• to learn about new way of learning method of problem based learning with emphasis on collaboration and openness from different disciplinary backgrounds
• to improve my pedagogical skills through effective collaboration learning and assessment  
• to meet new people from diverse backgrounds.

Important things I learnt:

After discussing with participants in this course, I learnt that

• While designing a course, it is important to understand and respect the prior understanding and knowledge (threshold concepts) of the students in addition to their maturity level of literacy in digital space. Though most of them are well aware of social networking tools in personal space, it is necessary to improve their presence in professional space and motivate them to become a resident.
• The issues with digital literacy will become more predominant especially in designing MOOC courses. I need to take into consideration of various direct and indirect factors while formulating of designing a course because of reachability of unexpected regions pose various challenges. This will trigger the need to update the course according to student’s needs and supporting material with threshold concepts and carry out scaffolding.
• From my engineering background, it is essential to consider multi-disciplinary aspects. The foundation of collaboration learning provides great insights to my learning, especially in digital space. Integrating the knowledge from diverse and multi-dimensional thought process in addition to their disciplinary backgrounds further broaden my knowledge in solving a particular research problem.
• Further supporting the threshold concepts and foster collaborative learning, blended learning method is a good option. There are several opportunities for students, teachers and institutions for adapting blended learning with traditional courses though it has also some restrictions.

Pedagogical theories:

During this course, I learnt and applied various pedagogical concepts and theories;

• Problem based learning
• Threshold concepts,
• Kolb’s learning cycle (experiential Learning)
• Connectivist learning theory
• Interactive methods in ICAP
• Higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy
• Universal Design Learning

Technology facilitation:

I learnt and browsed through several tools that can be adopted to the existing courses in digital environment. The tools I learnt are whiteboard (Miro), mind mapping (Mural, Coggle), presentation (Genially), Canva, Thinglink (interactive), notes (Padlet), etc..

Feedback:

I liked the concept of Problem based learning and Fish model that will be applied in one of the sessions in my course. I liked the structure and selection of relevant topics that raised the importance of online collaborative networked learning which is beneficial me to think beyond and experiment with new methods. It would be better if the facilitators pay attention to take feedback mechanism more seriously that is important to the concept of constructive alignment. Some of the ways, for example

• facilitators/co-facilitators give immediate feedback to blogs for every topic. This will improve blogging skills for the next topic.
• peer-to-peer feedback, though asked to review one blog per week, is not that efficient. Probably, the facilitators of the group needs to encourage participants within a group to review the blog post. This will improve to include some missing points during discussion
• Include Quizzes to refresh what we learnt for each topic, although it takes so much time to create a quiz.