The ONL course is almost over. What a journey!
I learned many things through my engagement in this course. First of all, I experienced how it is to learn through sharing experiences, concepts and ideas and through building your own experiences together with other people in an online group. I learned that collaboration with other people is possible and can be very successful even though we have never met physically! I had the great opportunity to be in a group with members of different backgrounds with rich and interesting educational experiences and views. In each topic in this course, each member contributed meaningfully to the group not only in terms of content but also by transferring and sharing their experiences and their ideas; they opened up! Moreover, I learned how to formulate and communicate new ideas in a more direct and visual approach, by getting to know new digital tools to me thanks to the fruitful inputs and brainstorming of our group. During this course, very interesting and brave projects were made such as a pictochart, a mindmap, a podcast and narrative videos.
In the course, we learned about many topics: digital literacies, openness, collaborative learning in networked communities and blending learning. My educational practice from now on will not be the same. I feel that I have learned to be a better teacher, I got engaged with new concepts and I deepened the level of my knowledge with concepts I already was acquaintant with. Now I know that there are many possibilities to improve my courses, I can make them more relevant and attractive to the students and promote collaborative learning in an intrinsic way. I believe that technology has a central role in teaching nowadays, especially in technical, engineering and natural sciences. To this end, students need to get familiar with different tools and be able to learn in a deep way using technology.
In the future, I am planning to implement blended learning to my courses in a more systematic way and I will try to open them up as much as possible! To this end, I would like to design the courses in a way that so computer-aided learning can play a more important role in the teaching and learning activities in a meaningful and interesting way. For courses, such as chemistry or biology, I would like to try to set up virtual experiences for the students, for instance a virtual lab where they can play around and try different experimental set ups and be allowed to make mistakes in a controlled and safe environment. These experiences would be complementary to the actual lab sessions and would serve as a support for the students to be able experiment and explore a scientific situation using their knowledge and curiosity.
