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So this sums up a very helpful course about online collaborative learning! I found many aspects from the course very useful for my own work, in both teaching and for collaborative research work. Three take-aways thus far are:

 1) The vast diversity of available tools to use for online learning is impressive! I found this intriguing, but also it became very clear that such tools would be of very little help without a clear purpose and clear structure for online interactions.

2) I very much enjoyed the discussions we had about ways to move online teams from simple coordination and distribution of tasks, to more collaborative learning. The notion of “blended learning” and the ABC learning type cards are very useful, and I will certainly use these in my future teaching planning with colleagues.

3) I liked the emotional aspects of online learning. We didn’t elaborate that a lot in our group, but I see this all the time in my collaborations. This is something I might dig into a bit deeper in the future since it overlaps somewhat with my current research interests. 

Image borrowed from this site.

One interesting observation from this last topic had to do with group dynamics in our own ONL group! It became again very clear that it is incredibly easy to coordinate and distribute tasks. So for example, the first goal for our team was to simply compile our individual take-aways of the course in one post. Easy, and fast. But after some clever nudging from one of the more experience facilitators, we managed to get in a more collaborative learning spirit: building on each other experiences, raising the level of discussions to us as a group.

To me this means the following. It is easy to settle for rapid, result-oriented task distribution. But with some clever nudging and experience, it is just as easy to boost truly collaborative online learning. Thank you all for a fun and very useful course!

Topic 5 – Lessons learnt & future practice