When first starting the ONL202 course, I was first a bit terrified of the length and magnitude of work to put into it. How should I be able to balance work and the course workload at the same time? I will not say it has not taken a lot of time, it has. However, I have never ones regretted it. As someone said, it is difficult to already at this time know exactly how large impact ONL202 has had and what I will find most useful in the future.

What I can say is that is has been a revelation of how important interaction is for learning and for that to work you need to create a safe environment within the virtual classroom. I will definitely bring this with me and spend more time to plan for well-suited ways to implement interaction and try to take more the role as a facilitator than a teacher. I will for example take part as a teacher in an online distance course where I shall prepare pre-recorded videos. This will take place in March, so I will now take some time to plan for
how to do this in a way to keep the audience interested even though the important part of interaction will be missing. I am much more confident to face this task after taking part in ONL202 and I believe I have retrieved useful know-how on what help students to learn and what hinders them in their learning process. I believe the student surveys we conducted in our groups were very useful for this purpose.

I have also during ONL202 come across a large range of tools and ideas on how to best use them so they add value instead of removing the focus from the important things. I really like the idea of creating communities for teachers, which have had me thinking on how this could be applied in my department and wider. Actually many of the things I learned within this course I think is of value not only to online teaching but also in the regular face-to-face teaching.

What was far best with ONL202 was the PBL group work. We had many interesting discussions going on during our meetings and I learned a lot from them. Especially as a fairly newcomer to teaching it was valuable to listen to those with a lot more experience and you benefitted a lot from the multi-disciplinarily and multi-national constitution of the group. I will definitely miss our group discussions but I hope we will be able to stay in touch.

And last but not the least, this course opened up my eyes for MOOCs for the purpose of personal development. Perhaps that will be a good new year’s promise to engage in at least one MOOC 2022.

The best way to learn is from and with each other