I started this course with a very applied, hands-on approach that differed from most of my fellow course mates (or should I say digital learners at this point?). I am in charge of organising and co-ordinating an online open course, and since this is all new for me, I thought this course would be a good opportunity to learn more about pedagogy in digital learning environments and develop skills to directly apply to my course plan development.
This course has been real fun and it really exceeded my expectations about what I could learn. I really liked the course design, although it took me some time to understand all the different activities for each module (individual reading/videos + Q&A seminar + blog posts + commenting on other people posts and write in the forum + the final paper… at times it felt overwhelming!) but the fact that every module had the same structure really helped to keep track of what I was supposed to do. Unfortunately, due to over-ambitious planning on my side, and above all due to the miserable failing of that planning depending from an unforeseen amount of VAB (taking care of sick children), I gave up on participating in the collective moments after a couple of modules and I had to follow the course at my own pace. This resulted in me ending up writing three blog posts at the end, and it was a bit of a challenge. I am sure that if I could have been able to follow the course as part of a community of learning, instead of as an individual learner, I would have benefitted much more from this course. But I appreciated the flexibility of the course design, which allowed me to finish the course anyway, even if I did it slightly slower.
I will not repeat here what I will apply to the course I am organising, as it is all written in the final exam paper, but I just want to state once again that this gave me important tools for thinking through the course design with more awareness. Thank you for your teaching, social, and cognitive presence (á la Vaughan et.al. 2013) and I hope to meet you in other courses in the future!