Lessons learnt – future practice

I want to say big thank you for everybody who contributed to this course, I think that the experience that we've got here is amazing. And special thanks to my PBL13 / Focus  group which have put so many efforts into making this learning a fun and interesting experience. These several months passed so fast and I can’t believe it’s over.  But I believe it’s the beginning of the new road.  

There so many things that I’ve learned during this course:

1. Digital tools – there are so many of them and they can enrich and bring learning experience to the whole new level. They can facilitate the process itself as you can work synchronously and asynchronously, they help to express your creativity and collaborate with colleagues.

2.  The importance of collaboration in learning process. Every member of the group brings his own input, inspires others and helps to see the situation from the different angle, thus you learn much more than you would by yourself. It helps in terms of motivations as well, because being a part of the team and trying to achieve a common goal together it much more inspiring.

3. Online courses, MOOCs. There are so many possibilities and variety of online courses that I am willing to take some of them for my professional improvement and self development.  

4. Creative commons. I’ve learned how to use online content, how to reference it and how to add license of use onto my own material.  Also I’ve learned about OER - Open Education Resources, there are wonderful databases that can support my teaching.

ONL 172 course was a model itself that will help me to design my personal online course. You can read a lot of theory about designing an online course, but when you experience it yourself and see how everything goes and develops little by little then it‘s much easier to see the idea behind it.

 I think the same is in classes, if you just transmit information, make a summary for students and retell the facts, it does not have the desired effect. But PBL – problem based learning and activities, collaborative learning help students to engage in the situation or problem and the effect of learning is much better.

I think that it is very important to build personal learning network (PLN) and hope the connections that we’ve made here will continue to develop in the future, so that we could share our experiences in teaching and in general.