Dear ONL’ers,

To start off with a really important issue: Europe switched from CEST to CET on Sunday, October 27. Winter is coming for us northerners…

As October moves into November, we have a week to catch up and reflect. The course may seem to consist of a lot of meetings and activities, but a major part of it is what happens in between. Therefore, this week does not contain any scheduled events and since you are all busy people, you probably have one or two things in the course that you need to catch up with.

Your group has been working for five weeks and you have hopefully written your first two blog posts. These are a few questions to ponder: 

• When you look back at the meetings with your group, what do you see? What are you happy with? What could you do differently (better?)? 
• And blogging – how has that been for you? For most academics, writing is defined as serious work done within certain terms of reference depending on which part of academia one belongs to. With blogging, there’s an opportunity to do something different, something else – an opportunity to let one’s personality show, express views and opinions. And… it’s difficult and scary too. If you haven’t already, we strongly suggest that you read a few of your fellow participants’ blog posts, and comment! There’s nothing like comments for motivation! The blog posts from participants who connected their blog to the ONL site is found here.

(You could also possibly want to have another look at the course requirements, here, to see what is expected of you.)

At this point, one or two of you may have noticed that the initial frustration or feeling of clumsiness and awkwardness in relation to some of the tools etc has somehow lessened. We believe this is due to the fact that you DO things, that the course is authentic in that you are put in the place of real students and immerse yourself in the material provided in/found through the course. We often put it as “the course IS the course” and the result of it all mostly depends on what you do with it.
To create accounts etc. and familiarising with the course environment is thus not preparation before the course starts; it is well spent course time and part of the content!

Apart form generally catching up and reflecting, there is one thing we’d very much like you to do: fill in a survey, here – preferably by Wednesday, but the survey will remain open until Sunday! The survey regards the concept of Community of Inquiry, and we will return to this during topic 4.  

AIMS

By the end of this topic, you will have had the opportunity to

• Reflect on your learning so far in the course
• Catch up if you have missed anything

SYNCHRONOUS ACTIVITIES

The reflective week does not include any scheduled activities.

CHECKLIST

During this topic I have:

• Participated in the survey
• Written two blog posts, one for topic 1 and one for topic 2
• Read and commented on other participants’ posts
• Generally caught up with the course work