My name is Ida and I work at Lund University Commissioned Education (LUCE) as a Project Coordinator. Representing all faculties at Lund University we provide tailor-made courses, training programmes, and capacity building programmes (international and/or national).

Since a couple of years, I have taken a particular interest in eLearning and the digital tools we can use not only to democratize learning (and knowledge) but also to share existing knowledge across continents. This is why I am taking the course in Open Networked Learning.

This is how I presented myself at the beginning of this course.

The Learning

Today, I am happy to say that I have deepened my knowledge in ways to increase student online participation, the challenges of hosting an open online course as well as its benefits, and online course design. Most importantly, I have learned how it is to be a student in an online course. Funnily enough, I had never taken part in a pure online course, without any physical meetings. I have never been an online student.

To be an online student in an international setting, participating in group as well as individual work has been highly valuable for my current work at LUCE. As stated above my work sees me providing tailor-made courses, training programmes, and capacity building programmes to private and public sector, internationally and/or nationally. This means that I never teach, nor participate in any commissioned courses. I design, coordinate, administrate and advertise commissioned courses. Many of the commissioned courses are purely online; of not they are certainly blended. The experience of being an online student has been very enlightening.

With this experience in mind, I can now confess that I have previously not considered enough the students’ perspective when designing an online course. I have put a lot of responsibility on the student to understand my course design logic. I am not sure if it has always been a conscious action from my side, conscious or unconscious I believe it must change. We are providing commissioned courses to professionals and it is my responsibility to facilitate learning and make the learning process as smooth as possible. I am now convinced that clear instructions, rubrics are crucial in any online course. Dialogues between administration and student is also important to maintain high interactivity. Gamification is also a concept that should be adopted in order to encourage students to go online.

With this being said, I would like to thank my group 3 and the facilitators on this ONL course.

Live well.

-I