The course ONL202 have now come to an end and I must say I now have a whole new perspective about online teaching and learning.

The first thing I learnt was that I didn’t really know anything about online learning. Before the course, I have had few experiences with teaching online. My experience on online teaching is quite limited since just like me, most of us have been forced to teach online as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. Due to my inexperience, I have mostly just adjusted my classroom lectures and converted them to online lectures in a way that the students would feel stimulated to participate and be active online. Attending this course, however, has brought my attention to certain things for me to consider.

First, that learning online can take different forms. More specifically with the idea of blogging. Blogging my thoughts about the different parts of the course, helped me to dig deeper into certain topics that I wasn’t previously familiar with. For me to be able to reflect in the blogs, I also had to understand the topic I was blogging about. Blogging, although a form of learning, felt more like I was having fun rather than doing a task, which made it quite relevant for me.

Second, that there are multiple online tools that can be applied to facilitate learning. One reason I joined the course was to learn about different online tools I can use for my own teaching communication. I wasn’t disappointed because I had the opportunity to not just learn about certain online tools but also to try them out to see what works and what doesn’t. In every topic, my group and I used a combination of online tools for presentation. Some of which I will use in my future lectures.

Thirdly, that building a community online doesn’t have to be difficult. Apart from the way the course started with the connecting week, where we started by knowing each other in our group, the facilitators also organized the PBL group in a way that allowed us to keep learning about each other as the course progressed. We quickly learnt about some of our strengths, personality and built on one another’s knowledge. This made it quite easy for us to collaborate and work together in an effective way.

Lastly, that I still have a long way to go when it comes to learning about teaching and learning online. The different topics that we looked into – Digital literacy, Open learning, Collaborative learning and Blended learning, showed me that I still need to learn more about how to implement these different aspects into my teaching and be more open minded to others. For instance, the discussions my group and I had in the topics with digital literacy and open learning. Although my perceptions have not entirely changed concerning these topics, I was certainly enlightened on the different ways others in my groups have approached these different areas in their own teaching.

The way forward for me after the course is to work more with the applications of these different perspectives that I have been exposed to and I am certainly grateful to be able to partake in the course and also share my own perspectives with others. I also hope to continue to blog my teaching experiences as I try to implement what I have learnt in this course for my future teachings and interactions with students.