Category: Uncategorized

1. What are the most important things you have learned through your engagement in the ONL course? Why?

I have learned that I probably needed a kick in the butt. I have inherited my online courses from retired teachers and just copied and pasted them every new semester. I won’t do that next year. When September 2026 comes, I will add some new interaction to the courses.

2. How will your learning influence your practice?

I will do some changes in online courses where I am teaching. I will include some more tools for asynchronous collaboration on shared spaces like Miro and make it possible for participants to interact in a “richer” way. I will also try to have some online meetings that are synchronized.

I will also try to accommodate for participants labelled as “lurkers”. I will try to arrange possibilities for them to come and go and grab the knowledge they want and with respect to how they want to learn.

3. What are your thoughts about using technology to enhance learning/teaching in your own context?

I am very positive to enhance learning by using technology. Although technology must justify its use by doing something. For me, who often are in learning contexts where disabled people are participants, that something could be to add extra accessibility or usability. Technology used in the right way can act as an equalitarian force. More people can participate and by using technology more things can be done in a variety of ways. I also think that AI used in the right way can change how we learn and what is important to learn.

4. What are you going to do as a result of your involvement in ONL? Why?

In other words, this question is the same as question 2. So, take a look at question 2.

5. What suggestions do you have (activities and/or in general) for the development of eLearning in your own teaching or context?

I have come to think a lot of why we organise learning that needs to end at a specific date. I know the whole system of credits etc. depends on learning activities starting and stopping at specific dates. In formal settings that might be necessary but in many settings learning can go on without specific dates when you are supposed to be done with all tasks.

I also think that there should be a more ongoing experimenting with new eLearning approaches. And perhaps also that we get rid of some old rather bad online tools and use newer and better ones.

Online learning creates a number of opportunities for disabled people to get an education. But often when we design for online learning, we tend to reproduce disadvantages that are present in the physical world or we create new barriers. This is often out of ignorance. There are experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic that we should learn from, both good and bad. We did a work on that in a learning community of people with cognitive impairments. It resulted in recommendations for online collaboration:

Johansson, S., Jonsson, M., Gulliksen, J., & Gustavsson, C. (2025). User participation in co design – Requirements for accessible online collaboration: an exploratory study. Behaviour and Information Technology, 3001, 1–16.

Being able to study from home and adjust your learning activities to parts of the day when you can perform at your best is a huge opening for many people. The asynchronicity is an important aspect. At the same time, the level of dropouts are higher in online learning. One really positive thing with the ONL course is the “blendidness” in the online setting. Our meeting two times a week really created a bond at the same time as we could organise our own learning activities in-between meetings. So blended learning don’t have to be a mix between online and physical activities. It could rather be a blend of synchronous and asynchronous online work.

When do something shift from just learning to collaborative learning? From the teacher perspective we often try very hard to create collaboration as we see higher values when people connect and start to do things together. But from a learner’s perspective it is often not evident why collaboration is worth the extra work. If your goal is to pass a course to get an exam, the incentive for collaboration can be weak. It is an initial investment, and it might take some experiences of trying to collaborate before it feels like a thing that makes sense to do. I think that’s why it is easier to get this process going if a group has a higher goal than just to learn something. If you for example is a group of people who are formed by a mutual interest of societal change or create an innovation connectiveness and collaboration often arrive silently. It just is there. And if the group finds that new knowledge is needed to achieve a goal, collective learning often takes place or is easier to organise than in a pure learning setting.

If the above is true, then the recruitment of participants might be considered. Today we have a number of people applying to take part in a course. We accept them and then try to “bolt on” collaboration without really know the people in the group. Then we find it hard to mitigate or scaffold a setting that foster collaboration. Maybe we should prepare participants for collaboration before they apply. I don’t really know though, how that could be done.

I think the shift towards open access of research articles pawed the way for being more open also in other parts of academia and in knowledge production. You can clearly see that open access articles are being more downloaded and also more cited than when papers were locked behind pay walls. Perhaps also learning materials can go the same way. As a principle, I think that would be fair. At least if you operate on public funding it seems fair to give something back to the community and in some communities open learning resources might be the only way to reach large parts of the population. Or to reach rare and hidden parts in any population.

But I can se some problems. While my research papers are being published efter being peer reviewed by others there is no similar quality check at the moment for publishing open learning stuff. I can just create something, license it and put it out there. It will be up to the learner to evaluate the quality. Or perhaps some kind of social evaluation can take place like when someone put out an evaluation of a restaurant or a hotel.

Another potential problem that I can see is that of maintenance. Perhaps I have had the funding to develop my learning material that I publish as a free resource but some of the stuff will probably grow old and become increasingly outdated. I probably should feel that i have the moral responsibility to keep my material updated, but will I have the time (money) to do that. Should I let the stuff be totally free in the hope that someone else comes along and update? I am not that bothered putting things that I do out there for free. I have a small free “course” on how disability organisations could use statistics to strengthen their advocacy work for better living conditions for people with disabilities. It is quite popular, but I don’t know who uses it. I can only see in the visitors data that it is used. And it hasn’t been outdated yet.

This post is just to test that everything is on a roll. So if you see this I am.

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