Topic 5: Unfortunately, the end...

This is a series of blog posts about my learning activities in the Open Networked Learning (ONL202) pedagogical course.

The Online Networked Learning course has come to an end. It has been a great journey with intense group and individual work. It was intense, took considerable effort and time, but didn’t feel so. ONL was amazingly well organized with a diverse set of engaging activities. In the middle of the course I even asked myself, what am I learning here? What is the focus? When I realized that the course content and learning outcomes was right in front of me, as the course itself, I got really excited.

We were all there to learn about opennes, sharing, collaborative and network learning, online course design, and digital literacy in teaching. Every topic transition was smooth and seemed pretty well interconnected.

A quick summary of the main topics:

1. Online participation & digital literacies
2. Open Learning - sharing and opennes
3. Learning in communities - network collaborative learning
4. Design for online and blended learning

Which basically covered:

1. Digital literacy enables you to map your knowledge and use of digital tools, useful when creating and managing online courses
2. When you create an online course, think about openning and sharing, you may get useful reviews, comments and critiques
3. Online learning benefits from creating a community of strongly connected people, building a community and network connections promote learning
4. Different frameworks and models have been postulated when designing an online course, raising the importance of scaffolding students, thinking about social, cognitive, and teaching presences.

I would probably change the order that topics are presented, as below:

1. Online participation & digital literacies
2. Design for online and blended learning
3. Learning in communities - network collaborative learning
4. Open Learning - sharing and opennes

Course design is one of the most important topics, but came on a period that students were already stuffed with work. I felt that, in general, people engaged a bit less in this topic than the preceding ones. So, I would like to have first the discussions on digital literacy, then study about the course design models, then address the learning in communities to finally reflect on open learning by sharing.

Overall, the group work was amazing. Through the PBL activities and follwing the FISh model really promoted an interactive and collaborative work. I realized that with approapriate design and methods it is possible to have fun and fruitful online activities in group. In my next course, I’ll certainly promote these activities and implement most of the principles I learning in the ONL. These need to be done slowly as they require more effort from the teacher, and trying to implement all at one may overwhel me, as a teacher, and the students.

Once more, I would like to thank all my colleagues from the PBL group ¹, through which I learned so much, had lots of fun and am grateful to be part of it. Thanks Mohit, Kinaz, Marcus, Stephanie, Hui-Chen, Erik, and Vigdis, with the great guidance by Charlotta and Cecilia. 😄