Topic 5 - Lessons learnt – future practice
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Last week and last topic!
The ONL172 course has come to an end and these 10 weeks have
gone super-fast!
The actual reason why I took this course was because of the
project that I am involved in, FOCUS,
which aims to create open online courses in marine biotechnology and coastal
tourism. I am convinced taking this course have inspired me to create good
online courses. I have learned new things from the different scenarios during
the different topics, by attending the webinars, participate in our group meetings
and searching for more information online. I think that this has been a good
experience for all of us in the FOCUS-group, to see how we could collaborate and
communicate when creating our own courses in the project. We have seen the
advantages and disadvantages with different tools and platforms and what
challenges you could face when collaborating online. I have also learned a lot
from just the course itself, what platforms we have used, what tasks and
assignments we have completed, what tools we have used, how the webinars have
been organised and carried out. During the course, I have both learned more “practical”
things, like new tools, platforms, assignments but I have also learned new
things about online collaboration. How we as a group have collaborated and
communicated, how we have tackled the scenarios and how we have functioned as a
group. How the facilitators have facilitated us instead of teaching us and how
we have participated both synchronously and asynchronously.
Since we are going to create our own online courses, I think
becoming a student and taking an open online course has been a good experience for
us. I hope we have got a better understanding of what our future students could
experience when taking our online courses, what feelings, struggles and questions
they could have.
One big part of this course has been to interact with other
course participants, both in the big community and in the small PBL-groups. In
my second blog post, I concluded that I am very much a visitor (Prensky, 2001)
in the digital world. I rarely publish anything and just sneak around invisible
viewing others texts, posts, images etc. After these 10 weeks, I have changed.
I have started my journey to becoming more of a resident, by being active in
the ONL172 community, comment on other blogposts and writing this blog. I don´t
think there is something bad by being a visitor, but I think that you could
gain a lot more just by comment on someone’s blog and leaving some digital
footprints.
Reference:
Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part
1, On the Horizon, 9(5), pp.1-6.
Once you start investigating this field it's almost impossible to go back to old practices. ONL is just a short introduction but hopefully it opens the door to many new opportunities. Now let's see how the collaboration continues when you all start designing your own courses!
ReplyDeleteBeing a student, to start with, is a great way to understand the students' difficulties and problems as you very well wrote...it is the possibility to have a more empathic and real relationship with your future learners, understanding their difficulties and supporting them in their learning process, individually or as part of a community :) it was a pleasure meeting you and see you soon, online as a visitor or as a resident :)
ReplyDeleteIt was really nice to become the student! I guess we all, working in science, have this permanent need to absorb new knowledge. For me, personally, ONL had additional value, because i had nver participated in online course. Now, I know how is it and I hope that creating FOCUS courses will be easier ;)
ReplyDeleteAt the first my joined PBL 13 group meetings I feel like you, Elisabeth, siting in silent without video, without audio and only watching and listening to others. But when you start to understand what’s going on – you willing to say something, to argue. Let’s be like that in very near future, when we will create our course.
ReplyDeleteDuring online sessions we talked about active learners and silent learners. It is evident, that to be silent not mean to be passive. In my traditional and online lectures I always observe students behavior. It is no difference – in both cases some students is trying to dominate, others are more silent listeners. But they both submitting assignments on time and are hard working. Being more passive does not mean not learning. It’s mostly depend from out personality traits.
ReplyDelete