Open Networked Learning: final reflections

 When I registered for this course and expressed my expectations, I wrote that I was seeking for the holy grail of students' engagement. Moreover, in an internal workshop at my university (Mälardalen University, MDU), I told that my impression about ONL was about a meta-course, that is a course that teaches you about course design through a course. Now that we reached the end I can say that my expectations have been fulfilled, even though not in the way I was expecting. Indeed, I believe to have gotten at least a clearer picture and a plan about a possible way to engage more students in their learning process. In my opinion, the mean is learning communities: if I manage to create adequate learning communities and convince the students to actively contribute in their communities, this will on one hand engage everyone more in learning, and will also make course contents more interesting for the students.

When it comes to the meta-course expectation, indeed ONL has been a meta-course, but we have been fully/personally involved in the changes required for our courses. Indeed, as noticed also after topic 3, learning communities demand a change of approach in how students participate in group work. The fact that us teachers found ourselves kind of disoriented at the beginning of the course says it all about what kind of change in the mindset is needed. In this respect, one important aspect to take care of in my own courses will be "educate" the students to create learning communities and hence see clearly the benefits. During the discussions in our group, we reflected and discussed a lot about possible guidelines on how to create the basis for learning communities: start with specific assignments, create small groups, give engaging/open assignments that require the inputs from all the group components, create individual assignments to share the knowledge with the rest of the class and assess the learning of all the students. This sharing activity can be potentially used also for self-assessment, notably for intermediate tasks.

In a broader perspective, this course also stimulated some additional reflections about potential ways of delivering distance courses in fully asynchronous scenarios: in these cases, the power of learning communities is reduced given that each student goes at her/his own pace, so it should be found a suitable solution for establishing such communities. Intuitively, I would think to social networks as a possible solution to this problem, which is definitely interesting and worth further investigations.