I am very happy with my PBL group 5 that is actually made of amazing people that I would like to thank and name here (rigorously in alphabetical order) Agneta, Bahareh, Cheah, Miriam, Peter, Sanjib and Sven. Together with this I want also to thank the ONL staff for allowing me to join this course.

As for the most important thing I have learned in this course is probably related to listening and critically and/or collaboratively thinking about issues. Applying this knowledge to my educational context and finally creating new opportunities to use it in my teaching. After all, this is basically what is involved in the Higher Order Thinking skills of Bloom Taxonomy ( Armstrong, 2010) and I think this is the real strength of the course . Bringing together professionals coming from different disciplines and asking them to critically analyze and evaluate an issue in order to apply this new knowledge  to solve a problem/scenario that at the end contributes to creating something.

This new knowledge is not individually or hierarchically learned but is collective and distributed as professor Richard Elmore says  and this goes hand-in-hand with the principles of ‘active learning’ and ‘deep learning’ where the learners are at the center of their learning process, they are  not  passive participants that understand and memorize knowledge – like in the lecture-based classroom ( Adams & Gingras,2018).

In this context technology should be considered as the mean not the goal of the educational process.  It should be used to the extent it serves the pedagogy. It needs to be user friendly. All the participants must be familiar with its use. The teachers or facilitators need to know very well the digital tools  by considering first the pedagogical goal and not the tools’ potentials. They need to think about the goal first when they plan a course – like in backward design – and then choose the tool that can better serve this aim. In other words, a digital tool should not be chosen because it’s appealing or innovative, but because it enhances the educational purpose, the pedagogy.

As for my future, I would like to meet up professionals and academics to work and think together. This because I reckon that there is a new way of learning that is going on, it’s not just about applying the old way of instruction to online practice , it’s about getting aware that a new way of thinking and learning is emerging worldwide and I would be involved in this process.

As for the role played by institutions. I think they should adopt policies that enhance innovation by investing more resources in digital tools but first and foremost by investing in teachers training. In fact I am strongly convinced that one institution can have the most cutting-edge technologies but if it does not have the people who knows how to make sense of them, the technologies themselves end up being useless and counter productive for all the stakeholders involved. No matter what Artificial Intelligence can do, humans can still play a crucial role on instructing machines.

Reference:

Adams, P & Gingras, H. (2018). Blended Learning & Flipped Classrooms: A Comprehensive Guide. Ann Arbor: Part-Time Press.

Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/