The ONL experience has ended, and it was indeed quite sad to say goodbye to our group members. Even though we all came from very different backgrounds, somehow we managed to create a sense of belonging within the group.

One group member commented that she almost felt more belonging to our group than to her colleagues. She said, the difference between meeting her colleagues and meeting us, was this: when she met her colleagues, it was always about work. Before covid, she would talk with the colleagues in the coffee room and so on, but now all meetings online were very focused on work things only. In contrast, during ONL we were more or less hanging out online with our group, with less focus on a specific goal, and having more of an open ended discussion.

This bring us to the biggest learnings of the course. It was essential that the projects we produced during our course were not too strictly defined, nor were the criterias of a completed project too high. This let us enjoy the group work more and it let us talk more freely about our experiences, without restricting ourselves too much to any specific topic. I’m not sure if it was exactly like this for the other groups, probably not, but I’m happy our facilitators focused quite little on the quality of the projects instead of us having a good time.

How this learning should be implemented on other courses, is an open question! One has to acknowledge that if you have a regular course where the goal of a project is to produce a presentation or a solution for subject X,  the students will mostly learn more about subject X. The students will not learn much about the process itself – ie. how they could function better as a team. And the more weight is put on producing a high quality solution for subject X during the project, even less will the students think about the group work dynamics at all.

But in my experience, a feature of school projects is that the projects often times do not need to reach very high standards. If the students just want to pass, and the projects do not even need to meet very high standards, then you are really not teaching much about anything by assigning project work.

Another important learning was the schedule. The ONL group would not have created a sense of belonging, if we would not have met up regularly each week. It was more important that we got used to meeting up regularly, than that we have a very clear agenda for each meeting. (Of course, while we met up, we had some fun playful check-ins and check-outs too). Some smart person once said that, education needs two things: structure and time. In this case, the ONL experience was a bare-bones version of just that.

Regarding technology use, I did not perhaps learn too much new. The tools were familiar, and the way we were using them…. well, we were not doing rocket science.

Biggest learning about technology in education was perhaps the big differences among teachers and among schools. Everybody coming together through ONL was a great was to spread the knowledge across all kinds of borders. Thank you, and …perhaps see you online…..yes?