Daumantas

This topic helped me to re-evaluate my own teaching and learning experience. I am not teaching online at the moment, but I think that inevitably some of the lectures soon will be delivered online and some face-to-face. Courses helped me to understand that blended learning is not just online vs face-to-face, because the latter one can also be blended in it's nature as it's all about the tools and methods that we use in teaching. By the way can we still call it teaching, or it's more like guiding. I liked the picture posted in Aliona Yarova blog where it's written: "Teacher? NO. Creative Learning Designer". Probably that's more relevant name for a teacher in this changing environment and model of learning. At the same time it can be a big challenge to encourage students to take this new approach as most of them are not really used to that. But reading the articles, blog's by other ONL172 participants and discussing with my PBL13 group I came across m...

Well..here we go, 3rd topic is already finished and I will try to reflect on it. I have to say that the idea of collaborative learning is very interesting for me, I always liked top be part of the team. During these courses I'm a student rather than a teacher so it's a great experience to be a student again :) At first the idea about collaborative learning online didn't look so encouraging, because I didn't know how it is going to be implemented. But after the first two topics I've started to feel the idea and I think that it gives so many possibilities to develop and enrich our collaborative learning skills which makes the outcome of the whole learning process much greater. All our PBL 13 group members are from different countries, different fields and with different experience. Moreover all of us probably are quite different personalities, but that helps us to be strong as a group. So we meet twice a week, share the ideas, add our input and I can feel that we ...

Sharing and openness is really important for education. With all these new technologies it's becoming easier and easier to share the knowledge, but a lot of barriers exist as well. During Topic 2 I've learned that openness and sharing is essential elements for educations. But somehow watching the recommended videos and participating in online seminars  I've got the feeling that strict copyright rules and charging money for online courses is something immoral. I could not say that I completely agree with this concept. In my opinion if somebody invests one's time and knowledge to create a valuable online course or a MOOC then this person has a full right to charge for it, and to make his living as an author. However not everything is so simple and maybe there is no good answer how we can encourage openness and accessibility. Important question is: can a quality course be created without a funding or investment of someones time? Probably not. So in my opinion it is naive...