Dear fellow ONL222 participants,

I was able to set up the reflection page, although I still struggle a bit to customise it more to my needs 🙂 I choose the wording “Evade Holzwege” which is based on an extended meaning of the German word “Holzweg”. Literally it means a wooden path or road and we use it in a phrase “someone being on a wooden path”, which means someone is misguided, or doing the wrong thing. This appears to go back a long time when there were no established roads and wood workers went deep into the woods to harvest old trees. The paths they used and established did not connect villages, but instead led deep to the forests and ended in the middle of nowhere. Someone might encounter these paths and think they would lead them to the next village or city, but instead it led them only deeper to the forests. So I would like to evade Holzwege in my online teaching. Sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities that online teaching platforms are offering, and I am also quite tempted by them. So in a way I sometimes have to stop myself and always reflect on what is really useful for my teaching and what will actually transport the information I would like to give to the students.  Finding the right balance on how we present our content through text, games, activities and videos is quite a challenge, and an ongoing journey. I’m sure we will encounter some Holzwege on the way anyhow, but I am also sure that sometimes this will lead to new discoveries that we did not expect. All in all, I am quite happy to be involved in this new age of teaching and I think there is a lot ahead of us, especially when it comes to hybrid online teaching.