Learning and Growth Space

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Author: Nahid Taheri

Final Reflection

What ONL Gave Me That I Was Not Expecting

I signed up for ONL with fairly clear expectations. I wanted to learn more about online learning design, pick up some practical tools, and think more carefully about how to bring my teaching into digital spaces. All of that happened. But the thing I am walking away with that I did not expect, and that has stayed with me most, is a different way of thinking about collaboration itself.

Our PBL group did not start smoothly. The early sessions had that familiar awkwardness of people being professionally polite with each other, waiting to see who would take initiative, being careful not to say the wrong thing. There were moments of misalignment, some frustration, and a few weeks where the energy felt low. I noticed myself doing what I suspect most people do in those situations, contributing enough to keep things moving without fully investing, hedging against the possibility that it would not come together.

And then, gradually, it did. I am still not entirely sure what changed. Something about shared struggle, probably. You go through enough uncertain moments with a group of people and you either drift apart or you build something. We built something. By the final weeks the conversations felt different, more honest, more willing to sit with disagreement, more interested in each other’s thinking than in producing a tidy output.

What I want to carry into my own teaching is that same willingness to design for the messy, slow, human parts of learning, not just the content architecture. It is tempting to focus on the materials, the platform, the structure of a course, because those feel controllable. What is harder to design for, and more important, is the environment where students feel safe enough to not know things, to ask the uncomfortable question, to disagree with each other productively. That does not happen by accident. It has to be built, and it takes longer than one week.

ONL was not always comfortable, but it was honest. I think that is probably the highest compliment I can give a course.

Reflection on Topic 4

Topic 4 brought together threads I had encountered separately before but rarely seen woven together in one conversation: how we design learning, how we assess it honestly, how we build the conditions for trust and inclusion, and what AI now means for all of it. The combination made for one of the more thought-provoking sessions in ONL for me.

Backwards, but in a good way

In out group we talked about the Understanding by Design framework which was not new to me. I had come across Wiggins and McTighe’s backwards design logic before, start with the desired outcomes, then design assessments, then plan learning activities. But revisiting it in this context was a useful reminder of how easy it is to drift back to forward planning in practice: coverage first, assessment almost as an afterthought. What the framework insists on is discipline, the clarity to ask what does genuine understanding look like here? before deciding what to teach or how to teach it. That question sounds simple but it is surprisingly difficult to answer well, especially in higher education where content coverage often feels like the point rather than the means.

What resonated more this time was the emphasis on transfer, whether students can take what they have learned and apply it somewhere new, without being prompted. That is a much higher bar than recognition or reproduction, and it quietly reframes assessment from a measurement exercise into a design challenge.

Assessment that holds up

One of our teammates had a presentation on AI-resistant assessment and we decided to take that and review it. It actually landed at exactly the right moment. I went in slightly skeptical, the phrase “AI-resistant” risks sounding like we are simply making things harder for students rather than making assessment more meaningful. But the argument was more sophisticated than that. The assessments most likely to survive AI are the ones that were never well-designed to begin with: decontextualised essays, generic reflections, tasks with no stake in the real world. Designing assessments that require students to engage with their specific context, their own data, their own position, or a live and unpredictable situation is not a workaround, it is just better assessment design.

That framing helped me. Rather than thinking about how to police AI use, the more productive question is: would this assessment still be meaningful if a student used AI to complete it? If the answer is yes, the problem is not AI, the problem is the assessment.

Trust and inclusion as design decisions

One idea that stayed with me from this topic is that trust and inclusion are not soft add-ons to learning design, they are structural. Students will not take intellectual risks, engage in genuine dialogue, or produce honest reflections in environments where they do not feel safe or seen. In a university context, that is easy to underestimate. We tend to assume that adult learners arrive ready to engage, but readiness is something that has to be designed for and maintained, not assumed.

This connects directly to my ONL group experience. The collaboration took time to warm up, and in retrospect a lot of that was about trust building, learning who would take initiative, whose voice carried weight, whether it was safe to disagree or be uncertain. If that is true among a small group of motivated professionals on a course we chose to join, it is certainly true for students navigating a compulsory module at a university.

Reflection on Topic 3

Learning in communities: what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m still thinking about.

Topic 3 asked us to think about networked collaborative learning , what it means to learn with others across digital spaces, to build communities of practice, and to develop the kind of personal learning networks that can sustain us beyond any one course. It’s a topic that sounds straightforward until you’re actually inside it. Then it gets complicated.

My experience this topic was mixed, and I want to be honest about that rather than writing the version where everything clicked into place.

The idea that resonated most was the distinction between using tools and actually learning. It’s easy to mistake activity for learning. We posted things, commented, connected, and there were moments when I genuinely couldn’t tell whether we were producing insight or just producing content. The question I kept returning to was: is any of this landing? Is it changing how I think, or just filling the feed?

That line from the topic description feels more honest than most institutional language about online learning. The tools are not neutral. They shape what counts as participation, what’s visible, what disappears. When the platform becomes the point of reference, are you active, are you responding, are you present, the learning can quietly slip to the background.

The other thread I’ve been pulling on is the idea of a personal learning network. I came into this topic with a fairly thin PLN, people I follow, occasional exchanges, but not much that felt like genuine mutual learning. What shifted slightly this topic was recognizing that a PLN isn’t something you build once and maintain. It’s more like a practice: who am I paying attention to, and who is paying attention to me, and what are we actually exchanging?

Some of that happened organically in the group work. There were conversations, not posts, actual back-and-forth, where I felt something move. Not often, but enough to notice. Those moments felt qualitatively different from the broader network activity. Less visible, less measurable, more useful.

What didn’t work as well: the collaborative structure sometimes felt like it was producing consensus more than understanding. There’s a pull in group settings, especially asynchronous ones, toward agreement, toward finding the synthesis, toward closing down the discomfort of genuine difference. I noticed myself doing it.

I don’t have a clean resolution to that. But I think the question worth carrying forward is: what conditions allow a learning community to hold disagreement productively, to be a space for friction, not just affirmation?

If I had to say what I’m taking from this topic: the value of networked learning isn’t in the network itself. It’s in the quality of attention you bring to the people in it. That sounds obvious. It didn’t feel obvious while I was inside it.

Reflection on Topic 2

Moral and Ethical Principles: There Is No Universal “Openness”

One of the most striking things I found is that openness is not a neutral act, it carries cultural and ethical weight that varies enormously depending on context. The implication and application of ethics differ significantly among various existing cultures, even within the same continent, region, and country (link). This means that what feels like a generous, collaborative act in one setting (sharing and adapting a colleague’s materials) may feel presumptuous or disrespectful in another, where a teacher’s work is understood as deeply personal and not available for modification. 

The moral mission of open education has found a touchstone in international human rights, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both of which recognize education as a fundamental right (link). This is a powerful foundation, but it is worth asking: whose interpretation of that right shapes the OER movement? Much of the framing comes from the Global North, and that brings its own assumptions about what sharing, adaptation, and collaboration should look like.

A useful ethical checkpoint I came across suggests thinking about openness through three lenses (link): 

  • deontological (what are my obligations as an educator?)
  • consequentialist (what outcomes will sharing actually produce?)
  • virtue-based (what does it say about me and my community if I share or if I don’t?)

Insufficient attention is typically paid to the important ethical differences provoked by open practices, and this framework helps make those differences visible rather than assumed away.

My personal reflection: before sharing any material, it is worth asking not just can I share this, but who bears the risk if I do? Students who appear in materials, colleagues whose ideas informed mine, and communities whose knowledge is embedded in content all have stakes in that decision.

Democratizing Education: The Promise Is Real, But the Barriers Go Deeper Than We Think

OERs have the potential to transform education by democratizing access to knowledge and fostering global educational collaboration (link). That potential is real, and it is one of the most compelling arguments for investing time in open sharing. But the research reveals a persistent gap between the promise and the reality.

Openness of access is coupled with a cultural closeness, and the democratization of media may inadvertently exacerbate the distances between privilege and exclusion (link). In other words, making something freely available online does not guarantee that everyone can meaningfully reach it. Research on EdTech in the Global South identifies five recurring hidden barriers: the affordability mirage of hidden data and repair costs, digital literacy gaps among teachers and students, infrastructure fragility around electricity and connectivity, cultural-linguistic irrelevance of content, and policy-governance gaps (link).

Digital inclusion requires that several prerequisites be met: affordable, robust broadband internet service; internet-enabled devices that meet the needs of the user; access to digital literacy training; quality technical support; and applications and digital content designed to enable self-sufficiency, participation, and collaboration (link). Most OERs assume most of these are already in place and for many learners globally, they are not.

The language problem also deserves attention. The vast majority of high-quality OERs are produced in English, which effectively limits who can access and adapt them. True democratization would require not just open licensing, but active investment in translation, localization, and culturally grounded co-creation with communities not just for them.

My personal reflection: releasing something under a CC license is a starting point, not an endpoint. If I want my materials to genuinely reach and benefit a diverse range of learners, I need to think carefully about who I am imagining as my audience and then actively challenge that image.