In the topic 4, I learnt many new concepts related to online and blended learning. I was confused about many of them. For example, I never heard that there exist some models that we can use to design a blended course and that designing a course can be different in emergency situations compared to normal situations.

In my experience, I only designed a blended course during the covid 19 when I had to manage to prepare my lecture materials in an effective way in a short time. Before that, I barely used to send my lecture notes via email and every other teaching activity was carried out in a face-to-face manner. I would say that online learning experiences can be quite challenging for certain cases for example when teaching large groups or when students are not hardworking enough, so they easily lose the level of engagement. This can be frustrating for the lecturer.  From my experience, during the covid 19, I learned that designing a blended course must be carried out carefully and many details must be taken into consideration.

My way was to give synchronous sessions with the students where I used Microsoft teams, recording the sessions, and then uploading them in Microsoft stream, so students who were not able to attend a session could watch the session at their convenient time. I also created FB groups so to ensure that the information reach the students as most of them use FB. After we returned to face-to-face teaching, I kept some of my teaching activities online such as the supervision of graduation projects as this ensures certain flexibility.

Although I believe that online learning and blended courses is a great way that maintains the learning process, I think that sometimes it is not that effective for some cases. For example, if we are teaching some practical subjects in medical schools where the students must interact with the lecturer to learn better. Maybe this where the limitation appears, and probably that needs more efforts from the lecturer side which might require to follow specific models when designing blended courses that fit with tricky subjects.

The other big concern is how to attract students and minimises the drop rate. I personally believe that the physical interaction helps to attract students and if one opts for a blended learning course, the physical interaction must be compensated by some means.  

Through the ONL group discussions and webinars, I learned that the field of online learning and the design of blended courses is a rich and promising field, and it is gaining a lot of benefit from the advances and affordability of technology nowadays.