The most important thing that I have learnt throughout by participating in the course has little to do with tangible stuff and much more to do with confidence in using digital tools and navigating in an online environment. When I entered the ONL course, I considered myself to be digitally illiterate. Although that might have been true with respect to using digital tools of various kinds, it was not true with respect to some of the more important competences that you need to navigate an online environmen – such as e.g. critical thinking skills and others which have been described by Doug Belshaw. I have also learnt the power of openness and engagement with people with whom I would not have met in real life, in order to gain access to other people’s experiences and perspectives. Taking into account that people in an online community can come from all over the world is something which adds an additional dimension to my learning.

I have already noticed how the ONL course has contributed to me changing my practice – at least when it comes to my own learning. I engage more with online material to search for information about various topics. For example, TED Talks (and the like) have become one very inspirational source of information that I use in my profession and which I can share with my students – knowing that the information is credible. I also feel much more confident when it comes to what material I can use and how and have started to notce all those copyright licenses. As a matter of fact, I have made use of such material to a larger extent – not the least when engaging with colleagues on learning for sustainable development.  But, I can do much more.

Working at a campus university, my teaching has been (and still is) rather traditional. However, I can see the power of using digital technologies also in such an environment, e.g. as part of a flipped classroom or blended learning experience. Letting students prepare by watching already existing lectures or recording the most important stuff that I would like them to focus on before they come to the classroom makes a lot of sense to me. I think that it can contribute to increase the quality of discussion in the classroom. I can also see that such an approach could better engage students who learn better from watching and listening than reading and writing. This is something which I will try to implement in order to change the dynamics in the classroom once there. More generally, I am also less sceptical to sharing my own work more openly – at least when it comes to teaching materials, cases etc. With respect to research work-in-progress, I still sense the threshold for openly sharing is higher.

I joined this course out of curiousity but also because I wanted to create an open online course for taking on sustainability challenges. Exactly what such a course would look like, I still don’t know. However, I think that digital technologies, and the creation on an open, online, community of inquiry, would be a very powerful way of addressing such matters – not the least since it can bridge the local and the global as well as various perspectives.