ONL- the journey is closing

I started this course same time as I started as a teacher. I need to admit that I did not know much about online learning or open network learning. But what a journey it has been! During this course my theoretical knowledge has enhanced so I feel comfortable to teach my courses online, asynchronous and synchronous. From the beginning of my journey I was hungry of knowledge, and in my opinion it is much easier to learn new things when your mind is open and you are interested of the topic. So keeping that in my mind, I now understand better the student point of view, and try to (with the help of this course) design my courses so that my students can feel the same enthusiasm and become more active in their own learning journey.

What are the most important things you have learned through your engagement in the ONL course? Why?
The most important findings during this course is the group building- and how me as an educator, can support and guide the students to learn work better in groups. The second thing I found important was how to design the course with online/face to face and asynchronous/synchronous activities. This is important as my course will include these elements but now I understand how to build the course with these various activities.

How will your learning influence your practice?
My learning will directly affect the way how I am designing my future courses.My future courses will be better designed and I hope my students will also notice that.

What are your thoughts about using technology to enhance learning/teaching in your own context?
Technology is here to stay, and I think this is one step which make the group work working smoother, but also activates the students better. So in my opinion, the technology enhance the possibility for students to be more active.

What are you going to do as a result of your involvement in ONL? Why?
I am going to design my courses according to the PBL group work guidelines. I will also support my colleagues in this topic and recommend them to take this course.

What suggestions do you have (activities and/or in general) for the development of eLearning in your own teaching or context?
Design asynchronous activities (such as film, written material) combined with discussion in small groups and that way put together asynchronous and synchronous activities.
For elearning activities combine them with possibility to ask questions online.
Small case studies during the online session with small groups, and try to encourage the students take a active part for discussion. I will also put more effort for the students who are not showing active participating and try to catch them in the beginning of the course. This could be chatting, getting contact and ask if they need some help. Also, starting an online lesson and a new course by breaking the ice is a good approach. During the week 4 many of the groups were focusing on that, and while reading the results of group work I found many good ideas of doing this.

What I am missing from the course is that I would like to have possibility to have access to the PBL group results. As the weeks were quite intensive, I am probably not the only one who did not have time to read through all the group works(even though that would have been a good thing to do).That could be done by collecting all the group works for a ebook, so after this course we could have material created in all PBL groups to support our future learning in topic.

I am grateful for this course and how it enhanced my professional skills as an educator.