Jesper Augustsson

OK then, it’s (sadly) time for me to blog post for the final time in this course and to summarize my experiences and what I have learned through these weeks that began already back in February. The ONL team has kindly put together questions for me to use when I reflect back on the course, and that I am happy to employ. What are the most important things that you have learnt through your engagement in the ONL course? Why? There are several matters that I have learned actually. Most importantly I have improved my collaborative skills and a bit of the many pedagogical aspects linked to this method of learning. I already have mastered a lot of the technical tools used in the course. In fact my competence in that area surpasses a lot of the material provided to us by the ONL team. David White had some nice professional looking videos though. However, Al Creelman told us early that this was not a course in which we would be taught on which button to press so I didn’t expect to lear

Hi guys, OK so about this topic I have chosen to reflect on “Are there opportunities for further development in this area that you have identified as a result of your own experience as a learner in the ONL course and of your engagement in this topic?” from the suggested themes by the ONL team. And the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes!”. I was struck with the video by Dr. Marti Cleveland-Innes (only one of them worked, just sayin’). She pointed out that the Community of Inquiry-model that consists of social, cognitive and teaching presence may also have a 4 th presence, namely emotion. It was obvious that a lot of people in the ONL course also thought so, almost all the input in the padlet concerned emotional presence. In a slide Cleveland-Innes spoke on desirable traits for a teacher to project, specifically: ·         Relaxed confidence, conviction ·         Enthusiasm, excitement, passion, a sense of drama, curiosity, sincerity, concern, honesty ·

OK so for this topic I have chosen to reflect on ‘an occasion when real collaborative learning took place that moved your own thinking forward’, as it is aptly put on the ONL page. Although I have experienced some collaborative learning in the past (but sadly, and remarkably, only a few times) as a teacher, I choose an occasion a couple of weeks back when PBL09 worked on Topic 2 (Open Learning – Sharing and Openness). Rarely have I experienced such an effortless and stunning group work, and where the collaborative learning resulted in a quite nice video presentation. When I try to analyse what went right , so to speak, I go to the literature to try to find factors that were important for our group to be successful collaborative learners. In a study by Scager et al (2016) that focused on factors that increased the effectiveness of collaboration in university courses, it was shown that “factors evoking effective collaboration were student autonomy and self-regulatory behavior,