When reflecting back on this ONL course and this spring it is impossible not to think about the dramatic events in society caused by the Coronavirus and the world wide epidemic with its overall impacts in many areas and the sudden need for online teaching – “remote emergency teaching” rather than planned online course teaching, as someone put it. Strangely enough the sense of being connected through other teachers in different places and countries during this course, following how everybody needed to cope with sudden change and challenges, served like a red thread and almost had a sense of normalcy to it, since this course was online anyway.

I will never forget that one of my PBL group friend wrote on our group page on the 9th of March, 2020, that he had signed up for this course because he believed online teaching was the “teaching of the future” and he needed to learn more about it. On the 17th of March Swedish universities closed down their campus teaching and went all online. When writing this we are still completely online and we have no idea how long this is going to last.  I think many of the participants, including me, had similar motives for signing up and we expected to be able to explore new digital tools in order to design better online courses in the future.

Perhaps the ongoing crisis helped us to understand one of the key words of the course better, namely networked. This is actually one of my my main insights of the course, which has also been very nicely summarized by another course participant in my group, Lucia, who in her blog post reflected on the fact that the key words “open” and “networked” in this course turned out to be much more important than she had expected – see her blog Lucia’s thoughts while learning @ONL201.