Taking an Online Networked Learning (ONL) course can be quite a challenge and an overwhelming experience for an ONL rookie, at least in the beginning of the course. This is a brief story of experiences of one such ONL-rookie :-). Let me start by saying that although this course was pretty heavy in terms of workload and sometimes overwhelming, but overall it has been a very pleasant, interesting, engaging and rewarding journey. Here I present some highlights of this journey. But before that I would like to share one of the memes created by our ONL group.

Not so long ago, writing a blog seemed like facing a ‘scary beast’. Well, not anymore, as I am comfortably writing this blogpost! Writing a blog felt uncomfortable in the beginning mainly because I am used to sharing and publishing my ideas, theories, methods and solutions through formal modes of communication, e.g., journal articles or conference papers. In this case, there is a targeted audience and one receives formal comments and feedback from the audience. This may not be the case for a blog. Through this course, I have realized that blog can be a very useful tool in learning and teaching. One remarkable benefit of blog in my experience is that it offers a systematic and super-fast medium to share ideas, thoughts and models and get fast feedback from a very large audience, in principle, everyone with access to the internet. Throughout this course, I have received very nice and valuable feedback from the readers of my blog, which has contributed towards refinement of my ideas, thoughts and models.

Thanks to this course as well as to the knowledge and experiences of my group members, I have been exposed to so many useful learning models and digital tools that I did not know before. The scaffolding provided by the facilitators of this course was very useful. In this regard, I found the FISh (Focus, Investigate and Share) collaboration model to be very useful. In fact, I am planning to introduce this collaboration model in my own teaching. Our group decided to present the results of each topic using a different digital tool. This decision provided me an opportunity to learn and use so many digital tools such as Padlet, Prezi, infographics using Piktochart, Word cloud, Word Art tool, Mural, just to mention a few. I plan to use these tools in my personal work as well as in my teaching.

The course also provided important insights into open learning and sharing. In this regard, I found the concept of the Creative Commons to be very interesting and practical as it facilitates sharing and open publishing while ensuring proper acknowledgement to the original developer/author of the content. The Creative Commons license allows open sharing and distribution of licensed material with proper credits to the licensor (owner), while taking exceptions and limitations into account. I liked this concept so much that I went on writing a blogpost about it (the brilliant idea of Creative Commons). I have already started to use the Creative Commons license (“Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike”) in my works, e.g., see the figures in my blogposts about the brilliant idea of Creative Commons, Effective Collaborative Learning and Emotional Presence in Collaborative Learning. I plan to use the Creative Commons licenses in my teaching materials as well.

I think one of the remarkable learning outcomes from this course was the valuable experience of effective online collaboration within Problem Based Learning (PBL) groups. Inspired by the organic collaboration style in out PBL group, I went on proposing a new collaboration model for problem solving in PBL groups, called the iterative fork-join model. In this model, each individual member or subgroup breaks out (“forks”) to investigate the problem independently in the first iteration. At the end of the iteration, the group members “join” to present their individual findings to each other and discuss them for the purpose of refining the findings, investigation inputs and other related parameters. This process is iterated until the desired results are obtained. The iterative fork-join model was refined and adapted to construct a hierarchical iterative fork-join model on the basis of discussions and practices within our PBL group. The adapted model facilitates the collaboration using various hierarchical levels of the iterative fork-join model. This model was further extended by incorporating the effect of emotions in collaborative learning as shown in Figure 1. The details about the amalgamation of the hierarchical fork-join model and emotions are available on my blogpost Emotional Presence in Collaborative Learning. Based on the experience of utilizating this model in our group, I believe, this model has the potential of generating deep collaboration and learning in PBL groups. I am planning to use this model in some of the modules in my teaching that require problem solving in collaborating groups.

It will be a remiss if I don’t mention that this course motivated me to create my first-ever meme, which is related to the Hierarchical iterative fork-join model

In the end, I would like to thank our group facilitators. I must say, our group was lucky to have the most awesome facilitators. I also extend my gratitude towards the course facilitators and my institutional facilitator Lotta for providing important and useful feedback on my blogposts in a timely manner throughout the course. Finally, I would like to thank my PBL group members—The Eleveners: Anya, Donna, Joanne (Jo), Katarina, and Stefan. Thank you for a fantastic collaboration! I learned a lot from all of you. I am going to end this blogpost by extending a quote from one of the Eleveners (Katarina):

The Eleveners was an effective and awesome PBL Group, now it is our Personal Learning Network (PLN)!