My most important insight from the ONL course is the power of group collaboration. The course designers have lead by example and allowed us to experience from the inside how to build a successful collaborative learning environment.

Now, how can I proceed to put my new knowledge to work? I don’t teach online. In fact, my department does not offer any online courses at all. So should I leave the insights idle until an online teaching assignment comes my way? Of course not. Instead, in this final blog post I reflect on how the ONL message can be incorporated in my offline (campus-based) practice.

In the course that I currently teach (an elective in financial economics), I dedicate plenty of time to seminars where we discuss academic articles. For a typical seminar, I ask all students to read a textbook chapter about the topic in general, plus an article that is relevant for that topic. To make the discussion interesting, I assign different articles, such that each article is read by 4-5 students. In the first hour of the seminar, the students who read the same article get to discuss their answers to a set of prepared questions. In the second hour, I scramble the groups such that students who read different articles get to discuss with each other.

Here are some thoughts on how this mode of teaching can be developed in the spirit of ONL:

• The topic that I teach is new to most students, and the students have diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, the seminar format is unusual in the finance curriculum, and they do not have much prior exposure to academic articles. This certainly creates anxieties. ONL taught me that the best way to overcome anxieties is to identify them, allow the students to talk about them, and to create a “safe” environment to overcome them.
• I like to create new groups for every seminar session, to challenge students to work together with other than their friends. ONL challenges me here: by allowing the students to stay in the same team they can create a collaborative learning environment over time. The PBL group can then be a solid base for preparation. At the seminars I can still do cross-groups. This can create scaffolding and allow my seminars to reach new discussion highs.
• Finally, maybe the course doesn’t have to be all offline? Instead of dedicating the first hour of the seminar for the students who read the same article to discuss with each other, maybe they can do so online, without me listening? This would free up time for deeper discussions at the seminar. However, the group work may require facilitation to take off and to stay on-track. With scarce resources, the facilitation probably needs to come in a different form than they did in the ONL course. Does anyone have ideas about how to do that without “sitting in”  at the group meetings?