ONL161 – looking back

I met Alastair Creelman at a conference for teachers in Mariehamn in February. He suggested that I take part in this course and the PBL part of it, too. I think this is an important course for any teacher for many reasons. Yes, it is great to learn more about different programs. But, I think we sometimes get carried away with the technology and thus forgetting what an amazing experience it is to connect with people and learn from them and together with them.

Technology makes this communication possible which is why it plays such a great part in any online learning environment. In my PBL group we used Google docs as a collaborative tool throughout the course. We combined them with different presentation tools such as Padlet and MindMeister. I even convinced my group members to try a Tweet chat as a collaborative presentation and then Storify to collect all tweets in a more accessible manner. Which just shows how open they were to some of my more crazy ideas, thank you for that! 🙂

Yes, virtual tools are wonderful but people are the ones that matter. I really enjoyed taking part in tweet chats, webinars, videoconferences and blog commenting during the course. Now, looking back I think there are two reasons for that. Partly because it was very professionally done and I learned much from it as a teacher. The facilitators and lecturers were prepared and actively participated. It was a joint effort from start to finish. The tools supported the pedagogical theories.

Partly because I got closer to the people in the course. I will remember Arla and Ahmed, Paula and Anders from my PBL group and your faces on the screen, and all the laughs we shared during our videoconferences. I will remember, and my blog will save, all the wonderful comments Kay, Annica and Arla among others left for me. I appreciated them immensely, and the discussions we have had here. I hope I was able to contribute to some of the blog discussions elsewhere as well.

The thing about the new virtual spaces online is that you actually need to try them to know them. As a teacher it has been useful to see how much time some tools take to learn, why information should be super easy to access, how important it is to support collaborative learning from start to finish (thank you Anders and Paula!). Students are just as easily frustrated by technological issues as teachers are. Students do not have endless time to find information. Students need to learn how to communicate with others, when to do it and how to work together on assignments. That is why the course design needs to be thought through from start to finish.

In short, this is an experience all students should be allowed to have. I will open up all my courses in the future. Sometimes to Twitter, sometimes to blogs, always to Open Access material if possible, but my guiding light will continue to be collaborative efforts in many different ways. Technology connects people, ideas, thoughts and information. In these connections there is always learning potential.