ONL 192 - Topic 5: Final reflection on ONL

With this final reflection ends my fast and furious learning experience in ONL192 😊. I am absolutely thrilled by this extremely intense time with fantastic new insides, great collaboration experience and countless opportunities to reflect on the blended learning scenario we have established for our part-time students at my university. An extremely intensive, but great and rewarding time!

I think problem-based learning and my collaboration experience in the PBL group are two of the most important things that I have learnt through ONL and which will definitely have impact on my work as a program manager.  

Looking back to my first blogpost I was really keen on learning about problem-based learning (PBL). Going through ONL I found, that this approach could be a good opportunity to enrich the modules in our professional part-time programs, which right now focus mainly on project-based learning. During a 3-4 months period students have to complete a work-related group-project by developing and presenting solutions and strategies for a specific problem. PBL gives a chance to open up this strong/common focus on the project and offers students to focus on their own learning interest/experience, e.g. working on different themes within a common topic and share as well as discuss the findings.

In addition to that, I really enjoyed to learn about the facilitator role during our PBL group work and I am sure, this experience will influence further thinking about the actual “lecturer/expert-mentor-model” we use right now.

Worth mentioning for influencing my professional practice is definitely the great collaborating experience with my PBL group 10. How interesting and exciting to take the time getting started to really discuss and collaborate on specific topics. After having done many group works mainly by co-operating, this real collaboration experience was new to me and would may be new to some of our part-time students as well. Along with this collaborating experience I realized that amongst others the following three points help to build and maintain collaborative work:   

• participation through social and emotional presence and

• meaningful group or individual activities, which require to

• constantly submit work/results (producing artifacts– e.g. like words, concepts, stories, documents,…)

Furthermore, it was extremely educational being forced to use new tools and really work with them. Although knowing some of the tools, I never used them in practice.

Finally: Thanks to my PBL group 10 and our great facilitators Diane and Sinako. Our facilitators did a great job by smoothly handing over the responsibility for our group and individual learning processes. Thanks so much to both facilitators and my PBL group 10 for this fantastic, deep learning experience!