ONL allowed me to explore both familiar and less familiar topics regarding teaching while it also provided a chance to study and work the way we want students to. I believe that we are more likely to succeed if we have first-hand experience of the things that we are trying to implement and thus all teachers who want to design successful online and hybrid collaborative learning need to have taken part of this kind of learning themselves. ONL provided teachers and educators with a great opportunity to do that. The course has also served as an opportunity to reflect on current teaching practices, emergency practices brought on by the pandemic, as well as future practices. The last two years have fast-forwarded education into an era of online and hybrid learning and for teachers, it is high time to reflect on what this change might entail and reconsider the way they do things.
The most significant take-aways from ONL for me, concern openness and equality. While I had come across open educational resources before, I had not fully thought about their potential or the possibility of only using open resources in teaching. I see many benefits with open educational resources and although I believe that traditional course books will still hold their ground for many years to come, I view a shift towards using increasingly more open resources as a positive development, which will increase access to education and equality among students. Open educational practices are related to the use of open resources, and here as well, I see many benefits to teaching. Students can become involved in knowledge-creating processes to a higher degree, which offers an opportunity to boost student agency and engagement as well as to promote collaboration.
Lastly, I think that ONL had a lot to teach about the importance of community. A move towards an increase in online, hybrid, and tailored solutions does not mean that we will no longer care about the role of community in learning, but on the contrary, active community building becomes more important than ever before. ONL itself illustrates that a sense of community can form online, despite cultural, geographical and time zone differences. Perhaps teachers of the future do not have to focus on content creation and instruction as much as on content curation and facilitation of learning through design of community building. At the end of the day, it all boils down to one question: what is needed for learning to take place? With regards to this, I want to mention Kerry Howells’ research on gratitude in relation to learning. According to Howell (2013), our readiness to actually learn in a given learning situation is affected by what kinds of inner attitudes we bring to the situation and gratitude, especially, seems to have a positive effect on our learning. If we can appreciate the learning situation as the gift and opportunity that it is, we are also more prepared to take part of what it has to offer. And we can practise and teach a state of preparedness. Thank you for reading.
References
Howells, K. 2013. How thanking awakens our thinking: Kerry Howells at TEDxLaunceston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzfhPB_NtVc [Accessed: 30.5.2022]
