So I get it now. This entire course is designed according to Salmon’s five steps (2012), right? And  if so, boy, have I stumbled on the climb up the ladder. I have also taken shortcuts, skipped rungs, almost fallen off, but somehow always gotten back on again. In summary, I think it’s a bit too early for me to say what I have really learnt and what I will stay with me in the future. I am still reading up on the stuff I did not have time for earlier in the course, I am looking a webinars I missed and youtube clips I wish I had seen earlier. 

What I know for sure is that I never would have made it here without the people in my PBL group. Smart, hard-working, fun and supporting they have been. I wish I had had the opportunity to spend more time with them, to read all their blog posts, to communicate with them outside our meetings. But the reality is that this course has taken place outside my working hours, in my spare time, and I have so very little of that time precisely to spare. So despite all the stumbling and panic, I am quite proud of myself for having reached the end and feeling reasonably enlightened by the experience.

The course has also been an eye-opener. First, on an individual level. I leave with lots of ideas for how to develop professionally: what online courses can look like. What to add to the courses that run now, what to remove, what to restructure. This is the immediately enriching and fulfilling part of the course. I leave with a check-list of do’s and dont’s. Second, the course has also made me aware of the importance of institutional and collegial support. And here, there is much room for improvement. How serious, for example, is my own university about online learning? If, as Jeff Haywood at University of Edinburgh, suggests, one can tell how serious a university is about online learning by “checking if it’s there, on their main web page”, what does the absence of such information suggest? And how does one go about creating an environment that promotes student retention and pedagogically sound online courses if the entire collegiate is not involved, or actively resists such efforts? 

To these questions, the course cannot provide an answer, of course. But it has helped me to formulate them, which is a first step. Of many, in the right direction, I hope.

References:

The State of Digital Education (2017). Report from the European Commission Conference, Malta. Retrieved from:  https://education.gov.mt/en/digitaleducation/Documents/conference_magazine.pdf