Finally it is time for some reflection and meta-comments about my experience with the ONL202 course. I will organize this post around three main themes: (1) my general remarks about the way this course designed and unfolded, (2) my main take-aways, (3) the road ahead.

To begin with, I think that the course is very well-developed, organized and executed by a team of experienced lecturers and facilitators. The organizers of the course have rich and in-depth cumulative experience obtained from previous iterations of the course, and this has helped the course run pretty smoothly. I have seen some reflection posts here and there that the actual amount of work required for this course is more than what is being advertised in the beginning. It might be so. But it really does not matter as far as I am concerned since my approach to learning (as well as teaching) does not entail much accounting of this sort. After all, what is the price of a truly useful skill you can gain at the end of the day?

I like the fact that the course enables learners to engage with the subject matter at three levels: the entire cohort of ONL202ers, the PBL groups and individual reflections. At the cohort level, the interactive webinars were a great opportunity to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and broaden participants’ perspectives by keeping high level of diversity. At the group level, the course designers also maintained that diversity by carefully curating each PBL group and putting together participants coming from different cultural backgrounds and functional areas. In my own PBL group, I observed a nice and smooth evolution of group dynamics. To be more specific, at the beginning of the course, our collective efforts were based more on cooperation where division of labor was the main approach adopted. However, as we proceeded further, our group started to resemble a community where we began to collaborate with a sense of common identity and deeper mutual understanding. This pattern has reveled itself in our group outputs. In particular, we had a rather impersonal and distanced tone and content in the outputs (or “group artifact” as we call them in our PBL16) during the first couple of assignments. However, in our later artifacts (especially Topic 3 and Topic 4), our group has started to develop a stronger engagement with these assignments. Another thing I liked about the design of this course is that we have the space and opportunity to see the artifact of each and every other group. This brings in two main benefits: (1) we could comment on each other’s work and share feedback for further development, (2) it gives us an opportunity for self-reflection by means of comparison. Once again, this emphasizes the perks of keeping things exposed and enabling interaction by all means (in other words: O + N = L). Lastly, at the individual level, we have the space for reflection in relation to both the general theme of the corresponding week and the specific dynamics of our group work. Personally, I find writing as the best way for thinking and working on these blog posts has been immensely helpful to make sense of and digest what I experienced throughout the course.

Although I have come across with some new and useful digital tools (e.g., Padlet, Slack, Coogle etc.) during our collective work with the PBL group, I would not call that kind of learning as important and meaningful. Frankly, I could have learned about such tools (and many more) by watching some videos (like this one) on Youtube. So, I do not believe that I really needed to enroll in ONL202 to learn about such digital gadgets. Same could also be said for new knowledge I obtained about practical and legal aspects of making courses open for others to join (c.f., Topic 2). For me, the significant part of learning has taken place in situ: through interaction with others during joint webinars and during our PBL group meetings. In my opinion, such kind of personalized learning is much more valuable because it is tacit, experiential and unique. Fortunately, this kind of interactive environment constitute the backbone of the ONL202 course.

Another noteworthy point of learning (or increased awareness, to be more accurate) was the importance of social side of education. The necessity of establishing personal rapport and affective engagement with students has been sort of a red thread running across different modules of the course. To be honest, this is the part where I feel that I have a long way to go. As I briefly touched upon in one of my earlier posts, I tend to adopt a rather ‘professional’ (read: distanced and impersonal) style in my teaching, be it online or offline. Even if this style might suffice when the course content primarily consists of technical and fact-based themes, now I can see that the both depth and scope of learning would remain quite limited unless I develop a strong and mutual social presence in my courses.

Lastly, where do I go from here? I believe it is still too early to tell. Change takes time, effort and, sometimes, it might require you to swim against the (institutional and regulatory) currents. I also believe that it is not realistic to expect that one could obtain all the knowledge and to develop all the skills required to start adopting a new style of teaching. Seen from this perspective, I think that ONL202 was a very useful introduction (or a teaser, if you will) for a much longer journey of change and self-development. In other words, at the end of this course, I am more knowledgeable about different possibilities and alternatives. Which of these alternatives I would pursue further? It remains as an open empirical question yet to be answered.