Chamara Kumara

During the COVID19 pandemic, all the courses at the university had to be given online. This happened during the period April-June 2020. With a short period of notice, teachers had to transform the course that was designed to give in a traditional manner to an online environment. Of course, as one would expect, transforming a course directly to an online environment without rethinking or redesigning would not give the best learning experience for the students. However, we cant also blame the teachers as things happened within a short period. However what surprised me was that when the new study period started in August 2020, still most of the teachers have not to think about this transformation seriously. Most of them were complaining about how to do the exams online. Of course, the traditional exams where you have in an exam hall will not be ideal in the online environment. One has to rethink and redesign these courses so that it student get a smooth learning experience throughout the ...

 Topic 3 - Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning Let me start my reflections by giving out real-life experience related to networked collaborative learning. This might not directly related to teaching but definitely a learning experience for me.   So me and one of my collogue was asked to write two project proposals to get funding for our post-doc research. we had to come up with a 12-page document within two weeks that covers so many aspects related to the project including comprehensive budgeting, time plan, companies, and how collaboration is achieved between industry and academia. For both of us, it was the first time we had to do such a task and did not know where to start and what expectations to be full filled. The first thing we did was asking around from our colleagues who also have written similar applications before. So we had a couple of discussions with them and got their project proposals as a guide to help us in writing. This gave us ...

 Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness This was also an eye-opening week for me. Stepped on to a topic which I my self has used while I was doing my PhD studies, but never thought about it too much. After listening to the  Ted talk  by David Wiley and reading through the article by  Maha Bali et al . I was able to broaden up my view that I had on open learning. For me, open learning is getting access to education irrespective of wealth, gender, religion,  citizenship etc. But at the end of the  2 weeks working on this, I was able to see that open learning is not only about getting free access to educational resources at any time from anywhere in the world. It also about openness in the pedagogical aspect of it. After reading the blog post on the topic of  What is Open Pedagogy?  by David Wiley, I realized that most of my educational efforts were on creating Disposable Assignments. This was eye-opening for me. I am sure that ...

Topic 1: Online participation & digital literacies The COVID19 pandemic made us maintain most of our connections online and teaching was part of it too. Thus, I thought of taking this online open network learning (ONL) course to dive a bit deep to make this unfamiliar area more familiar. At the end of this course, my objective is to be more efficient and effective in teaching in an online environment. WOW! what an experience so far. Meeting new people around the world and working in a fun way to achieve a common goal. So, we have just finished our first ONL211 task ( Topic 1: Online participation & digital literacies ) and now it’s time to give out my reflections about what I have learned from this topic. In this digital era, the majority of people who has a smartphone and internet connection are spending a lot of time online using online platforms and tools. However, each one of us has different objectives and goals when using these online platforms and tools. Each of us p...