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  Topic 5: Reflections and lessons learned Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash It is unbelievable that the course ONL202 has already come to an end... Our weekly meetings, twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 17.00 to 18.00, now no more...!!! No more the rush of finalizing everything on the weekend so that PBL content could be uploaded at the right time, in the desired form with consensus !!  And I am sure the group is missing it all too just like I do ..... But we all had a happy smile on the last meeting wishing each other well, promising to meet up again sometime. Most importantly we all agreed that we were going back from the course with a wealth of knowledge and new friends. We all have in our backpacks a bundle of new theories, new tools, and new perspectives. The entire bundle is so apt, extremely relevant, and with great practical significance.  For the last presentation, it was so much fun to make memes about our experiences as a group and to leave tips of advice for other
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 Reflections on Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning      Photo by  Joel Filipe  on  Unsplash Online and Blended learning...Hybrid learning...Flipped learning, Flipped classrooms !!!! These were some of the new terms that I was exposed to at the beginning of April 2020, perhaps the time when we the world started living in the times of the New Normal.  Interesting and challenging as it has been for the past 9 months now, metaphorically speaking, we see the birth of a different take at many things in life including teaching. All actors in this - students and teachers learned to handle the new tools, new technologies, and adjusted to new demands. But somethings remained common such as the educators' challenge regarding engaging students in classrooms and the students' challenge adjusting to new styles of pedagogy.  For this topic, the PBL 13 group took the support of Beck's model of online experience based on 3 components -  the social presence, teaching presence, a
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Reflections on Topic 3 : Networked collaborative learning

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 Reflections on Topic 3 : Networked collaborative learning Photo by  mahdis mousavi   on   Unsplash Collaborative networked learning ----This something that we, educators and learners, are doing these days !! Especially since the Corona pandemic has struck the world learning online and collaborating with each other has become the new, most practiced norm---the new normal.  In this topic, the question we posed was 'How can we integrate collaborative learning in our online courses? '-- a poignant question educators are asking themselves each day. Today, we teachers are all trying to make our courses as attractive as we can by connecting online teaching with learning content but we also try to connect the learners with each other. Further, there are numerous challenges educators face to ensure that they are able to form an educator -learner relationship. Educators don't just want to be facilitators of syllabus-based content.... they want to create a bridge that connects them w
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Reflections on Topic 2 - Open learning - Sharing and Openness

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  Reflections on Topic 2 - Open learning - Sharing and Openness              Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Well, this topic was huge !!!  The discussions spanned across various paradigms and perspectives. What began as an initial discussion on the need for openness and sharing in higher education soon converged into a debate on the pros and cons embedded in the system related to knowledge sharing. Somewhere down the line, we started speaking about the seemingly unethical practices regarding article processing charges (APC) to make knowledge 'open source' and how it inevitably creates categories among researchers seeking to publish - one, those who can afford to pay the fees and garner attention; and two, the others who did not have the funds or the possibility to pay and therefore run the risk of remaining unnoticed. The group was clearly divided in this - those who saw this as inevitable due to processing costs and involved remunerations. The others who thought that APCs
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Reflections on Topic 1 - Digital literacies

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  Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash Hello everyone....Soniya Billore here and I will share some of my reflections on being part of the ONL202 course Topic 1: Digital literacies . I must say that this topic opened some new doors for me - not only in terms of content and context but also for the tools we used to discuss and elaborate on the topic on digital literacies in our fun group PBL 13. The topic was very relevant to the actual experience teachers, researchers and practitioners are facing in the new normal- how to deal with digitalization and use them effectively. Digitalization definitely creates lots of possibilities but it also opens its own unique can of worms !! Now if we really want to optimize the value and benefit of digitalization, we need to think about it through multiple perspectives and through a discussion be able to identify the points of leverage and points of pitfalls. Our group did exactly this -  We focussed on Digital literacies and Online participation and we
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Welcome to my blog

 Hey there...finally here !!! My name is Soniya Billore and nice to meet you all 
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