Saras reflections

Just another Sola @ KAU site

Reflecting on the reflections

The type of reflections that was required for the ONL course have been quite different from my disorganized and ad-hoc reflections that I normally make. In ordinary cases, I constantly reflect on my teaching and development of courses. When I talk to colleagues, when I watch documentaries, scroll on social media or before, during and after lectures. This usually results in a few notes here and there.

As hard as it was in the beginning of the course, I’m grateful to have taken time to reflect. I have reflected far beyond what is written in this blog or what I contributed with to the PBL group. I started to reflect on my own history, why I do thing and what that means for my teaching and others learning. I have also left the teacher role which I seldom do, and taken a learner role. This shift of role has been very fruitful for my reflections. 

So what have been the most important thing that I learnt, it’s a hard question to answer. I learned a lot. To start with, I understood the importance of how our goals motivate us to expand our digital knowledge. I realized that even though I do not want to put everything I do online on Insta, snap or tiktok, I am not a reactionist. Rather, my motivation will guide me in my residency. Second, I learned that open learning is not about openly sharing my material, openly distributing my lectures and adopting a much more digital identity. Rather, openness is about the focus on the process and learning rather on teaching and content. Being a “I’m not an open learner person” I was surprised when I realized that that is exactly who I am.  Third, I finally gained solid support for why student collaboration is important for their learning. More important, I have gained knowledge on how to foster collaboration in groups and how these collaborations can contribute to learning. Finally, I went from going from the first PBL group meeting on the fourth topic feeling that it didn’t matter what the definition of blended learning was, to emphasizing the importance of its definition. I learned that two weeks, some articles and a few meetings can make a lot for how relevant we think a topic is. 

We live I a world where digital learning environments are almost interchangeable with physical learning environment. We are meeting a generation that is native in digital literacy and have high motivation for continue being so. If universities, and we as teachers with it, should be able to meet the challenges of tomorrow, we have to learn and understand the tools of today. ONL can help us with that. 

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