Abstract
This article examines the pedagogical role of the teacher in online education. Specifically, the transition from in-class room instruction to online instruction is a complex one involving specialized training in the technical aspects of delivering quality educational materials (or environments) to the students, and specialized training in how to foster knowledge acquisition within this new environment. The article focuses on the pedagogical training that an online instructor needs to become an effective teacher.The article investigates a two-week faculty development pedagogical training course aimed at preparing teachers to operate effectively within an online educational environment. In attempting to orient the teacher to the online environment, the course used a constructivist instructional methodology within an online context. Several types of collaborative exercises were employed such as virtual field trips, online evaluations, interactive essays, and group projects. The sample (N=44) represented veteran college teachers with little online teaching or studying experience. Tenured faculty (30%) and Instructors (25%) composed the majority of the class. The group had well over 13 years classroom teaching experience (53%), and over three-quarters are currently teaching in higher education institutions. Hypotheses were tested through online data collection and surveys to find out the effects of the pedagogical training on the participants. One important finding of the study concludes that teachers exposed to the course significantly changed their attitudes toward online instruction seeing it as more participatory, and interactive than face-to-face instruction. Another major finding is that after the course, teachers saw the online medium as more of an extension of their faculty work. That is, faculty were more willing to use the online medium as an extension of their duties.
Highlights
One of the affordances of the new online learning movement is the opportunity it presents to reexamine the ways in which some aspects of traditional instruction can be re-conceived to operate effectively in the online asynchronous environment
Without proper pedagogical training and online experience, teachers will continue to replicate their best existing practices onto the online medium. This divergence between what works in the traditional classroom within a stable cohort of learners communicating synchronously face-to-face is qualitatively different from an online asynchronous one
Subjects were matched and various indicators were measured. This online survey was the quantitative measurement of the dependent variables
Summary
One of the affordances of the new online learning movement is the opportunity it presents to reexamine the ways in which some aspects of traditional instruction can be re-conceived to operate effectively in the online asynchronous environment. The author’s claim is that teachers must have the actual experience of online learning before they can be expected to be online teachers; otherwise, they map traditional practices onto the new medium with little of the transformation necessary in the teaching process. This transference from what is known to work well in one medium to another is not a choice as much as a precondition. This divergence between what works in the traditional classroom within a stable cohort of learners communicating synchronously face-to-face is qualitatively different from an online asynchronous one
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