Online Teaching Skills Research Articles

Experienced online instructors: beliefs and preferred supports regarding online teaching

While online courses are becoming a mainstay of college course offerings administrators, staff, instructors and students have different perceptions about how online courses should work. While faculty members are expert in their discipline and institutions provide support for acquiring content expertise, how instructors develop skills in online teaching is neither systematic nor codified in higher education. This preliminary study reports findings from a Delphi study of expert online teachers who identified 11 institutional strategies that best supported their development of online teaching skills. Three major areas of most value were: training, external supports, and prolonged experience.

PST Online

Online teaching has become more pervasive throughout the 21st century, partly a result of new technologies allowing for interactive online learning environments and partly to meet the needs of students who cannot access traditional face-to-face classrooms for all or part of their schooling. Pre-service teacher education has lagged behind this uptake in online teaching, failing to prepare new graduate teachers for the possibility of teaching wholly online to students in a range of learning environments. Pre-Service Teachers Online is a website designed to address this gap by providing pre-service teachers with resources to assist in building online teaching skills. Current pre-service teachers' awareness of online teaching skills were sought, providing the foundation for the website. Presented is how the website was designed to meet identified pre-service teachers' needs allowing participants to reflectively consider how their current perceptions of teaching practices could apply in a blended or fully online classroom model.

E-moderating and E-tivities: The Implementation of a Workshop to Develop Online Teaching Skills in In-service Teachers

<p><span>This paper reports the experience of implementing a teacher’s professional development strategy that sought to foster e-moderator competencies among language faculty at a Colombian public university. The study aimed at finding the extent to which participants understood the concepts of e-moderation and e-tivities. We analyzed the participants’ performance in three different tasks to give account of the incorporation of the concepts. The results from the analysis of the tasks showed that participants understand online processes, they have some technical skills and they have many personal characteristics that will help them become e-moderators.</span></p>

Provide flexible options for faculty to boost online teaching skills

Faculty members know their subject areas well. But even if they're great teachers in the classroom, they need to learn new skills to be effective teaching online courses.

Online Staff Development Module for E-learning and Pedagogy: Analysis, Design and Development

In the following design case, Learning Technologists (LT’s) charged with developing a program for distance and blended learning describe the creation of an online module for staff development that helps lecturers to develop their online teaching skills. Using the Community of Inquiry Framework, the LT’s structured an environment in which staff learned fundamental ideas of online pedagogy and experienced common tools for the learning environment. They then applied those tools and information gained from the coursework to the design of their own online module. The lecturers-as-students are also asked to reflect upon their experiences as classroom lecturers and to incorporate that experiential knowledge into the course design process. This paper describes the development of the module, the elements of the module, and the lessons learned from the pilot run.

Provide flexible options for faculty to boost online teaching skills

Faculty members know their subject areas well. But even if they're great teachers in the classroom, they need to learn new skills to be effective teaching online courses.

The DOTS project: Developing Online Teaching Skills

The use of online tools in educational settings has become ubiquitous, yet effective online teaching requires very specific skills. To provide teaching professionals with an opportunity to develop such skills in a language learning context, the DOTS project (http://dots.ecml.at) was launched with support from ECML. The team is currently creating an online resource in the form of a Moodle workspace populated with bite-size training activities. Through these activities, teachers and trainee teachers of languages who want to extend their teaching into online spaces can develop and enhance their skills. The training materials are by no means limited to technical information and advice, but aim to increase the pedagogic quality of online language teaching. The training kit will provide self-training materials and worksheets that can easily be integrated into existing language teacher training programmes. Communication tools will also be integrated to make the workspace an interactive platform for communication as well as a resource for training materials. This will include forums dedicated to different topics, wikis for collating examples of good practice, and links to other online training spaces. The materials and tools are suitable both for relative novices with basic computing skills and for more advanced users who want to exchange their views and share their expertise on online language teaching.

Joining the DOTS: A collaborative approach to online teacher training

<p>Developing Online Teaching Skills (DOTS) is one of 20 “Empowering language professionals” projects currently funded by the Council of Europe's European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML). Its principal aim is to develop an online platform for delivering teacher training at a distance. Once completed, this collaborative platform will contain a range of modular activities for self-training via a selection of interactive CMC tools. This paper describes the participative process involved in developing this platform and in creating bite-size introductory activities to online tools for language teaching based on the input of online learning experts and users from 25 European countries.</p>