Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. (Adam Grant)

I’ve struggled to write this reflection for several reasons and all of them relate to things I’ve learned about myself through ONL. The first, and perhaps the most important one, is that I don’t enjoy collaborative learning. A few months ago, I would describe myself as an agreeable, open-minded and extraverted individual who thrives on social interaction, and ONL seemed right up my alley as it blended the topic of open and community-based learning with extensive networking opportunities. But as the course advanced, participating in the PBL meetings ranged from feeling uncomfortable to actually being painful, and what hurt me the most what not understanding why. Why did I enjoy the webinars where I could sit, listen attentively and process information internally and my anxiety sparked discussing those same interesting topics in a small-group setting? From day one I’ve asked myself: should I continue participating in the course and learning through the collective activities while struggling to interact with my team or should I leave the course behind and never think about this experience again? I decided to stay because I was determined to learn about open and community-based learning, but also because I wished to understand why this course’s framework was such an unexpectedly and strangely difficult experience for me.

Through my participation in ONL I learned that I’ve never experienced collaborative learning before; having worked extensively as part of teams and groups in a cooperative manner, with well-defined tasks assigned in advance and being able to work on them by myself, on my own time, at my own pace, using my skills, my background and my logic, I thought this would be no different. What I’ve realized is that the joy, the energy and the motivation I get from teamwork is deeply rooted on (self-)preparation and consolidated knowledge that, together with others’ ideas, make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. To actually build something together from scratch in real time, aiming at tunning such different brains to orchestrate something new and interesting in one hour is what was expected from this group of people who had absolutely nothing in common besides the will to learn about open education. I’ve realized that, to me, it is simply not possible to create something impactful and novel without knowledge and some sort of expertise on the topic, and empirical evidence is just not enough. My brain processed the PBL meetings as an (imposed) coffee conversation with total strangers about challenging topics that experts dedicate their lives to studying and where it was expected from us to come up with something. What I couldn’t understand was if that something should be trivial and mundane, in which case I was just wasting my time, or something interesting and novel, which I and the other team members couldn’t simply generate out of our life experiences or brief literature reviews. As other team members claimed to be enjoying writing and reflecting about the topics (which in my perspective were mostly shallow and trivial analysis), benefiting from the interactions and actually talking about some sort of connection between us that to me was inexistent, I felt more and more alone. As a disclaimer, I have never felt any unkindness or disrespect from my colleagues (quite the contrary!), and I believe my discomfort came entirely from this new setting that I didn’t know would shake me to my core and teach me so much about myself.

As we’ve learned with Hróbjartur Árnason, learning IS social, and I believe that, like any other social skill, it is likely the product of environmental influence and genetic predisposition. This means it should be nurtured and promoted from an early age while also acknowledged as a diverse trait in the population that should be taken into account when designing learning activities. I guess what this says about me (and probably many others) is that you can be highly sociable and agreeable, and still struggle to learn in a community or social environment without the proper preparation and support. On the other hand, before assuming that participants give up on the course because they are not willing to commit to this amount of work (as I heard several times along the course), perhaps one should reflect on whether some people are just not comfortable with the idea of spending two hours per week learning through discussions with people who know as much as they do about a topic and additional time generating resources to share with the community that are superficial and redundant, and add very little to the knowledge they had when they joined the course.

Besides what I’ve learned about myself as a learner and a team member – that I will transfer to my reality as an educator – my experience as an ONL participant has given me a whole new perspective on what it is to be a visitor and a resident in the online world. I hope to use these insights to tailor future educational programs to address the needs of both visitors and residents, recognizing that each group requires different skills and approaches, and also to reflect on where I fall on the spectrum visitor-resident to balance my own engagement and promote purposeful online interactions and meaningful digital participation. In addition, discussing about the creation of online and blended learning programs, its benefits and challenges as well as some strategies to effectively launch and manage them while fostering an inclusive learning environment has provided me with useful information to incorporate in the design of future online learning opportunities.

If someone asks me if I regret having participated in the ONL241 course and having stayed despite the discomfort, I would reply that I absolutely don’t regret it as it allowed me to meet interesting people, learn how to become a better educator and, most of all, discover that I know and respect myself more now than I did before. And for that I’m deeply thankful.