Topic 5

So time fore som reflection on the course, my PBL-group and my own work. If I start with the course it selves, I can come up with mostly positive comments, so let’s start there. The first topic was around openness and sharing, two things that have had great impact of the growth of Internet, and I hope that attitude will bring evolvement even to education and how we treat learning and learners in the educational world. On the other hand I sense that a lot of the trends right now is moving toward more closed platforms and protective behaviour in how companies and institutions tends to treat data and information. Other really interesting topics in the course has been around on-line learning in combination with collaborative learning. The social aspect is one of the thing that my head is spinning around for the moment, when planning for new courses and programs. I am sure that there are a need for teachers to focus on acting like a learning coach more than as a transmitter of information. The only things that I think is not that good in this course is that some of the tools like Twitter or bloggs feels a bit old school, but on the other hand I don’t have any concrete suggestions what to use instead.

If I try to reflect on my on role in the course and in our PBL group I feel a bit unsure. The first thing that crosses my mind is that I have experienced what it is to be a student in a type of course that I like to design for the new engineering program at our university. I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking with colleagues on how to create a good social context when a lot of education going on outside a traditional classroom. I cant say that I have all answers yet, but I think that I have made new insights and experiences that’s going to be valuable in future course design. Some of the links and recommended reading that where presented to us in the different topics going to be a good starting list of papers, reading and research in an area that I find very important for me as a teacher in the university environment.

As a group we initially had some problems to get together, this is probably natural but something to think about when I design for the same type of on-line learning where students are about to work in groups or peer with each others. I think that tight scheduling and some early group submission would speed up the process of seting the terms of how to work as a group. The group evolved, so after the first two weeks we actually got together very well as a team. The Zoom meetings has become more and more informal and I think that most of us are more or less relaxed when we meet on-line. Another thing that I experienced as stimulating is that we have had group members from different countrys and separat parts of the world. We also had diversity in working background. All this together contributed to interesting discussions and creative solutions on our submission on the different topics.