Lara´s blog

My view on ONL192 During the past twelve weeks, I have been taking an online course, ONL 192 [1] “Online Networked Learning, a course, a community, an approach”. The reason for taking this course was to get a deeper understanding of online teaching and learning. It was an intense and fascinating journey, that made me dive into tools for online cooperation, openness and content sharing, networked collaborative learning and methods and strategies to design online courses. I reached the end of the course and what have I learned? Well, twelve weeks ago, I was rather reticent and reserved about online courses. I thought they were only an option for motivated students that were interested in self-learning new subjects that would be otherwise not available in face to face environments. I also used to think that online teachers had a more passive role than classroom teachers. Twelve weeks later, my expectations for this course were totally met and my perspective towards onlin

During my first years at the university I used to perceive teachers as unsocial and always busy working on their important research work. Making questions during lectures or even during the hour they specifically created to answer students´ questions, would not cross my mind. I remember feeling that my questions were never smart or relevant enough to be asked. My first two years were therefore a struggle in terms of building my cognitive knowledge and my grades were a mirror of my emotions reflecting the state of merely coping with the academic environment. Fortunately for me, by the end of my second year, things started to change. The turning point was when I started studying with a group of about eight to ten people. We would give each other the required support to make us feel socially engaged and comfortable with academic interactions. Even approaching teachers would not be as intimidating as it used to be, and I started to realize that academic teachers were actually happy t