Topic 5: Lessons learnt – future practice

This course has been a very rich and valuable experience, that I wasn’t really expecting. Our group meetings, with very nice people from different backgrounds and cultures (Mirna, Cath, Musa, Torkel, Haleluya, Antonio, Wallace…), the subjects we studied, the PBL and fish model, the texts we read and the documents our group produced gave me a huge amount of practical, theoretical and personal input.

After 30 years of teaching, it’s easy to fall into a routine, using the same recipes, the same tricks, but this course made me think outside the box, wanting to explore new roads, implementing new teaching strategies. The place of AI, too important not to learn more about it, how to use it and not fight against it, scaffolding, a basic knowledge that you don’t necessarily think of after many years of teaching, , learning how to learn together by including the students in the learning process from the beginning of the course. All these were key moments of this course

I’m sure that everything I discovered, learned during this course will from now on influence the way I teach, the way I interact with my students, how I design my lessons whether on campus (most of my teaching) or online (I have 2 online courses and I will definitely going to reorganise them to make room for some of the knowledge acquired in this course : working on a trust teacher-student, collaborating in a group, synchronous/asynchronous teaching, using new tools like Padlet, Miro, Canva…). I knew that these tools existed, but I was perhaps a little bit afraid to use them (either because I didn’t know how to use them or because I didn’t want to make things difficult for myself or my students). But this course gave me the envy to really using all this tools to increase the interaction students-teacher-students, putting the students more in the centre, making them more active than passive learners.

Today, this technology has become inevitable, although it can sometimes be a little frightening as we get older, for fear of not being able to master it, of seeing students who are much more at ease with it, or on the contrary, being unable to use it. But the potential for teaching in this technology is so great that it would be a shame not to take full advantage of it, either for reshaping your way of teaching or engaging more your students. But it’s important for our universities to start taking AI seriously, and above all to start thinking about how to integrate it into teacher training. I am surprised, here in Sweden, a country that has long been technologically advanced, that this is not yet really in force. Even though the issue of AI has become a fairly hot topic at our meetings, we are moving forward slowly.

After this course, I’m first going to take a step back before thinking again about all the implications this course may have for my future teaching, extract the best ideas, that I would or should use in my class. And I will definitely reshape some of my courses, introducing scaffolding, implanting the use of AI for my different assignments, using news interactive tools… In short, try to become a more modern and effective teacher. It gave me so many new insights about my own teaching, realizing the depth of what I could do compare to what I do.

To wrap up, I would say it was a great adventure that I would personally recommend to many of my colleagues, who are often in the same situation as me, full of knowledge and experience, but who are looking for new ideas in a world, especially a technological world, that is changing at the speed of light.

Thank you for this experience.