Lessons learnt - my progress bar in ONL171

We are almost at the end of our ONL171 course. In February I started the course with two weeks delay, and was not sure until the beginning of March if I can make this course as I had also two other pedagogic courses to handle. When I saw the requirements of the course, I firstly thought that ONL171 is very time-consuming. However, my engagement and desire to work collaboratively helped to overcome the first two difficult weeks of the course.

My motivation to participate in ONL171 came from my personal professional problem. A lot of collaborators/partners did only slightly something for the publication and required to put them, their PhD students on the publications. I have asked myself many times, is it a standard that scientists collaborate in that way or is it something wrong with my partners? I looked for the answer by taking different online courses, pedagogic seminars, Swedish and many other courses. I have also tried to work with different scientists just for comparison if it works better, but no improvement. Then, I looked very deeply in myself if maybe my management and organisation are so heavy on my partners that they lose their interest to collaborate and asked some of them to explain why they cannot deliver results on time, and don't respond to my emails. My partners said that they are so overwhelmed with other obligations that they cannot find time to go to the lab and read up the instrument parameters for the article. I found that answer very strange, as it can usually take 5 minutes. Are we living in such stressful and overwhelming society, is it a problem of our daily organization or is it something else? I don't know...

ONL171 was another try for me to see how it will go with the collaborative learning. We had many situations where you are frustrated because other participants don't have time to do and we should deliver our final presentation, but maybe because we had our active facilitators at the end everything worked out. The first lesson which I have learnt - leadership is important in the collaborative learning. It does not mean that we should have a manager and an organisator present, but we need to have somebody who will guide us to the goal. The second lesson which I have learnt - the theoretical approach is not always in front of the practical advice. All our PBL5 participants were intensively reading the literature listed for each topic, but we did not always know how we are going to proceed. The practical observation and experience helped us to solve our PBL5 challenges in more pleasant way than a heavy phylosophical advice from the literature. The third lesson is to use the available free software without any fears. I did not know anything about Canva, ThinkLink, Prezzi, Flipgrid, etc.before I started this course. All these programs are free and easy to use. There are also very nice webinars which you can take almost on the monthly basis. I found 12 years ago that Word is not a good option for writing scientific material and replace it with the free Latex. It costed me 3 months to learn about Latex platform, but now I am very satisfied that all my presentations, articles, reports, technical instructions are written in Latex without any problems and with the highest quality. In our teaching classrooms we should not be afraid of technology and software. Especially that it will cost you extra 1-2 hours to learn and get at the end very satisfied students. The fourth lesson is globalization of knowledge. You cannot be everywhere at the same time. However, the excellent time and people management can make the collaboration even more successful than with your colleagues sitting the next door. We had one participant from South Africa (Susan van Harmelen), and she managed to be always on time and with a lot of input in our group discussions so that the geographic boaders South Africa-Sweden were not there. Only when Susan talked about +35°C and we had -10° in North Sweden, the geographic boaders appeared again. The motivation and engagement through active learning can delete the geographic boarders. We should not be afraid to collaborate globally with somebody who wants to work with you.

The fifth lesson is that never give up. I was interested to know how other participants understand the word "collaboration", and found out that we even don't need to talk what is the difference between cooperation and collaboration as we started to work collaboratively on the FISh document. Many final assignments and summaries of group discussions were made together as a group. For me PBL5 ONL171 was a successful model of the collaborative learning. Moreover, three weeks ago I have met scientists from Linköping University with whom we have written a collaborative grant proposal which was the first grant proposal which I was writing NOT alone. It is a sun rise for me. I think that my previous collaborative problems were mainly caused by the absence of knowledge how to understand collaboration. Sadly, it became like a sickness of our society that we say "collaboration" and don't know what this word means.

In the future, it would be very interesting and useful for me to write an article about collaborative learning. Maybe somebody from my PBL5 group will be interested to write a nice piece of work to replace heavy phylosophical pedagogic articles?