Unfortunately, the journey had come to an end. Being at this course ONL 211 was very exciting and a fresh experience that came to me at the right time of my career, although it was very foggy, ambiguous and challenging at the start, but the outcome was really worthwhile.

At the beginning of the course, I faced lots of obstacles and tried to overcome as much as possible. The first one was the language, although I used to be fluent with English but because of years spent without any practice, it was really difficult at the beginning to express my ideas in clear sentences to my group member. Second of all, time management. It was really hard to organize the time between PBL group meetings, webinars, reading resources given to us and doing my work. It really needed lots of effort and time to go deep enough through resources, understand the topic and get involved into discussion. I tried my best to attend almost all my PBL group meetings and if not, I tried to keep up asynchronously. But I was not able to attend all the webinars online due to time conflict with my schedule, so I watched them offline. The third obstacle I faced was the different cultures and different ways of thinking among the participants. It was overwhelming a little bit at the start but with time I really enjoyed these differences. The final one was writing the blog posts, and to be honest I did not see the point of it till I wrote the first one and found it a really good way to summarize all my ideas and share it online with others. It took me quite some time to finish my first one but at the end I liked doing it.

My experience with ONL 211 was not all about difficulties but also about learning and exploring new subjects and getting the chance to be a student again was really refreshing. I learnt to be more open minded at the differences that exist between us. I gained lots of new Ideas about teaching from My PBL experts’ teachers which I will try to use at my upcoming courses I am going to teach. It opened my eyes on a whole new world of online teaching and learning that I did not really know much about. I explored diverse collection of tools at this course and introduced to other tools that other groups use it, which I will hopefully try to impede them somehow with my teaching in the future. I enjoyed most of the discussed topics we had, starting from digital literacy which I think for this first topic, our group did an amazing job with finding materials and ending with the final presentation. I also enjoyed the last one blended learning; it was really one of the complex topics and there were lots of controversial thoughts about it. But personally, I really liked the third topic “collaboration”. Not only because I was one of the leaders and read lots of resources about it, but because I really had fun working collaboratively with my PBL group and my co-leader Laura on this topic.

ONL 211 was a great adventure to me, gave me new insights, new perspective on teaching and new Knowledge. In the future, I will share what I learnt with my friends and colleagues at my university. I am really going to miss my PBL 8  members (Laura, SuYian, Terese, Jari, Mika, Gunnar and Anna) thanks all, and special thanks for our facilitator/co-facilitator (Patrik and Nathalie) for the relaxing atmosphere of the group. It was really pleasure to work with you all and hope to hear from you at the future. Thanks, ONL for this opportunity that widened my world and enriched my thoughts.