As it is almost the end of November, it’s time for the second reflection part of the Learning theory course. I’ll start from my expectations for the online working on the chapters.
I hoped that the second part would provide us collaborative working in action. In the end it became more cooperative than collaborative. I was eager to work with our new colleagues from Estonia and Norway, but I knew that since our studies differed quite a bit, we would have to negotiate a lot. This turned out to be true. We all had different viewpoints, which provided us with a wide range of ideas, but also challenged decision-making. As expected, our group dynamics were versatile: some were “louder” participants and others were more quiet and reserved. Therefore our viewpoints were dominated by the louder participants, as expected.
The chapter, our product, became diverse. Maybe not as whole as I hoped, but it’s still something to be proud of. I didn’t expect our multinational teamwork to go smoothly, and it didn’t, the biggest challenges being timetabling and dividing work. Our course’s online implementation goes to show why even technology-enrichened learning – especially collaborative, goal-set learning – requires mentoring. Then again, even without mentors, we had people taking certain roles on their own: leadership and active participation, but also as a downside passive participation.
The hardest question when reflecting the second part is probably “What are the most important things you have learned during the second part of the course?”. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve learned anything completely new and mindblowing this month relating to this project, but moreover the project build up bit by bit on top of my previous knowledge and experience. Overall for the course in future I would recommend smaller group sizes (we had 11 participants) and more concrete timetabling.
Katri's LET blog 