The structure of the ONL-course itself will continue to influence my practice. The great benefit of PBL and group learning was an eye opener. Although I have worked a lot with group-based processes before in my teaching, it became clear to me all the benefits that anyone can achieve from collaborative learning. No matter what your professional context is, the experience of learning together will be useful. I think the PBL-group structure is a distinct way of experiencing the “producer perspective” of knowledge-making, that I wrote about in my previous blog post “Blended learning dynamics”. This also applies to the community of inquiry, and the element of “teaching presence” (Vaughan et. Al 2013) where the hierarchy of the classroom is challenged. I think this may be a strategy that I will use to strengthen and articulate the advantage of a producer perspective. 

During the ONL I’ve come across more examples of how diversity is, or can be regarded as an asset and a value for learning processes. This is already something that I have been using as a pedagogical basic assumption, but that has come to stand out as even more considerable.

The importance and possibilities of diversity, for all learning processes as well as what life processes need, depend on and thrive from. On its’ own and unreflected diversity can mean division and disruption. Seen as a value, diversity is a dynamic phenomenon for learning processes as well as for the biological conditions of the planet. In the ONL course I’ve seen diversity as something that connects all four topics.

Blended learning – The blend of a diversity of aspects, tools and methods for example; synchronous and asynchronous, analogue and digital, might be useful for a pedagogical future that takes place in diversity of digital, natural, virtual realms.

Collaborative learning – rhizomatic. A diversity of perspectives that are possible to connect to one another in any number of unpredictable ways.

Open education – a combination of open content and the pedagogically processed context for education. The openness of education could be built on a diversity of levels of open and context dependent content.

Resident or visitor – Ambiguity as a possible way to consider diversity as an asset and to emphasize the complexity of the digital as well as the analogue world

Making use of a diversity of perspectives, tools, methods and the dynamics that can be achieved from combining and remixing, is something I will take further in to my teaching practice. I think a lot of the aspects of e-learning will be important to apply to the irl-teaching. Both digital tools and methods used in the online classroom will be interesting to bring in to further challenge and develop the pedagogy of the “real world”. Then it will also be possible for us to further problematize the many presumptions that we might have of the irl-teaching and learning.

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press