“The Open Road” by Mike Penney Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
To me the most important part on the ONL course has been the process itself. I have been familiar with PBL on a theoretical level for a long time, but I haven’t really had any opportunities to engage in an actual PBL process myself before this course. The course was really time consuming and I realized early on in the course that time was going to be an issue for me. Therefore, I decided to focus more on the process itself rather than the content since the content was largely familiar to me already before the course.
What did I learn from the process? Here are some insights:
- The role of the facilitator is crucial. It seemed that during the first week we were all kind of lost and it took time to get to know each other and to start first cooperating and then collaborating. Getting started in the beginning would’ve been much harder without the facilitator
- You need to voice your concerns about the process when things seem to go the wrong way. Especially in the early weeks, it seemed that our group discussions had more questions than answers, and sometimes we were making things really complicated.
- Participation doesn’t have to be equal in every single task. We all have lives outside the course and some weeks we were busier than others. Since we were a big group, things always balanced out in the end.
- You can’t do it without your group! One of the most rewarding experiences was working and getting to know new people from diverse contexts. Building trust and learning how the other group members work took of course some time. However, we didn’t actually lose a single group member in the process, so we did something right! I hope that we will also keep in touch in the future
What next?
We are actually in the process of planning a course called “Communicating Sustainable Solutions” which will be based on PBL. Having gone through this process myself has been really helpful as I am now able to better put myself in students’ position. In the spirit of open learning, we have also decided to make the course as open as possible and use CC licenses for all the materials. The course will still be run in our LMS, but it will be open so that outsiders can also see the course materials. So in a way, this is not really the end, but only the beginning.
