I must admit that it is not easy to summarize the key take-aways from this course. I feel that insights will keep popping up and certainly I am not yet done with my ONL 192 learnings. As I am also quite new to teaching, I did not yet have time to establish any practices meaning that from the very beginning my teaching will be influenced by what I have experienced here. I feel quite happy about it—getting into the ONL community early in my teaching career will spare me from having to unlearn old habits that I would have probably developed should I have not been exposed to all the eye-opening activities and discussions we have had over the past weeks.

Some take-aways however have already crystallized quite well. First, the group work—experiencing it in our PBL group certainly transformed how I will approach group work in the future. Second, reflection and writing—even though I was well aware of the value of writing as a tool for learning, I rarely embraced it (I love writing research papers though). Now however I will get some discipline and will try to write routinely to facilitate my learning and will try to inspire my students to do the same. Third, it is the change itself—what we have experienced during the course has been quite remarkable. I am not sure even how to capture this in words—the best description would perhaps be that this is one of the most creative and constructive experiences I have had in quite a while.

The experience of collaborating within our PBL group (I am in group #9) has been—as stated above—transforming. It was overall so positive that I simply want more of it. I learned a lot by being as present as I could both during the meetings and when watching the recordings of the meetings I could not attend. I believe that one of the success factors is that I (and I have a feeling the other group members too) carried none of the baggage of past experiences of group work into our meetings—rather in the beginning I was trying to figure what was going on (I have never experienced anything like this and had no idea what to expect) and once I got into it I knew I was in it together with open-minded, hard-working, and fun-loving people whose company I enjoyed immensely. In the future I will certainly approach all group work with the same curious and open mind that tries to figure what is going on and is free from any preconceptions.

It is great that reflection and writing were incorporated as a requirement in the course. It put some pressure on me but if this would have been an optional task, I would have probably skipped it and, as a result, would have missed out on a learning opportunity. In fact, I love writing (and enjoy also reading about writing) but I typically put a lot of time into it and never do it on the fly. Within the timelines of the course I could not however afford a luxury of thinking things over for weeks and this was a challenge for me personally. Thanks to this course I did learn that I actually could dive into a subject, find a perspective that resonated with me, focus, and put some thoughts together. This was almost meditative and has even become addictive. This realization that there is capacity in me for reflecting and writing within limited allocated time paves a way for embracing writing as a learning tool.

Finally, my self-assessment suggests that I have evolved over these weeks. A lot has happened simultaneously with this course both personally and professionally. Even though the course did add to an already rather high workload I have had, it at the same time somehow made everything easier. First, I have felt overall much happier (for this I must give special thanks to Christiane, Kamala, Richard, Marie-Louise, Per, Filip, Sandeep, Lars, Maria, and Francisca). Second, I have felt much calmer—I got that confidence that we humans will somehow figure it all out, just as we did in our PBL group work. Third, the entire experience of the course has led to what I would call an irreversible mind expansion. It will certainly take quite some time to process it all (if it is even possible to process it all).

I would like to thank the course organizers (special thanks to Francisca, Maria, and Lars), all course contributors, facilitators (special thanks to Filip and Sandeep), learners (special thanks to our PBL group: Christiane, Kamala, Richard, Marie-Louise, and Per—I wonder if we could continue with our Zoom meetings? Hopefully I will also finally get that WhatsApp app you have been using throughout the course running on my phone), and all who have contributed to open networked learning ever since this movement has started. Thank you!