Insights: What are the most valuable insights that you take with you from this course?
The ride: How did you find collaborating in an online PBL group?
Take-away: What would you like to take with you into the future?
Questions: What questions do you still have?
This week was the final week of Open Network Learning 221. Up to this week, we’ve been given various scenarios related to up-to-date learning issues and we had really fruitful discussions in our group PBL4. Here is the list of those topics with both my blog posts and ONL pages:
- Topic 1: Online participation and digital literacies [My Blog Post] [ONL Page]
- Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness [My Blog Post] [ONL Page]
- Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning [My Blog Post] [ONL Page]
- Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning [My Blog Post] [ONL Page]
Instead of a single insight, I think I had a lot of valuable insights from this course: being a visitor vs resident in the digital world, openness as an opportunity to provide equal chances for all vs problems such as copyright issues, trust to open materials, challenges of being in a community and the idea of growing with the community while contributing to it as well, finally transitioning from classical in-person teaching to hybrid or blended learning way. Most of the concepts were either new to me or I did not spare some time to think about them. As it is also seen that most of the topics involve “dilemmas” which create counterarguments and makes it possible to discuss them from various perspectives. They were pretty valuable since we still don’t have a unique answer or solution.
At the beginning of the course, I had some hesitations regarding group forming and often had this question in my mind “Can we really produce something useful in an online group in which the members don’t know each other before?” Even though all the members are from different countries, perspectives, backgrounds, and maybe even generations :), we managed to form a smooth collaboration. I was initially biased to produce in a group, but surprisingly it worked well. The atmosphere in our group was quite positive and inclusive. Everyone was contributing to the discussions in some way and none of us was blamed if the workload became uneven. I think the key point here was that we were able to produce something nice in two weeks, which was motivating for the next topics.
The things that I would like to take with me into the future would be certainly the tools we used during discussions and some practices enabling us to do something as a part of a community. Some of such great tools that enabled group working are Miro, Canvas, and Padlet. Collaboration-wise practices that I will take with me are the idea of sharing some group responsibilities (moderation, logging, etc) and changing them from topic to topic. They were really nice ideas. I think this fosters the likelihood of members’ participation in group work, so I will try it for small group works in one of my courses.
The world is changing quickly. I learned a lot during this course, different concepts, tools, etc. But of course, there are still some questions that remain and even some new questions have arisen. Maybe the most critical one is that: Some teaching methods require some trial-error which in turn necessitates “time”. How will we adapt our teaching ways “smoothly” to changing world conditions?
To sum up, this week we used Padlet to gather our answers to those 4 questions. You can reach the Padlet from <here>. After that we summarized them and place them in the Miro board prepared as ONL island, where other groups share their experiences as well, the Miro board can be reached from <here>.
Lastly, I would like to thank my friends in our group for those discussions and knowledge sharing, and also the facilitators for their support and guidance throughout the discussions. Here, I listed their blog pages (in alphabetical order), I highly recommend visiting and reading them:
I had the same feeling, some hesitations about group forming and how will we actually come up with something that makes sense to all of us. Active participation helps but also a positive atmosphere. This really helps with the motivation.
Regarding the things to take with us into the future, I totally agree that the tools used during our discussions enabled us to create and be a group. Trying to implement small groups of work in our courses is quite a good idea to use….
Thank you for your great insights and constructive views on group collaboration and learning in the community. I highly appreciate your contribution to our learning journey and am impressed by your reflections. Happy to accompany you on the learning journey. Hope to read you more soon.
Thank you Gökhan for the comprehensive reflection about your ONL journey! It has been a pleasure to follow you from a distance and read about your thoughts and experiences related to the course topics but also teaching methods, practices and tools in this course. I also like your organised way to structure your blogs and keeping all these links attached so you can also go back to those later on. All the best for your next endeavors!