Okay, so I received this in my inbox a couple of days ago – and since I’ve already posted something about online teaching today – I thought that this may be of interest to some of my readers.
Here is your requested email alert when a new issue of IJ-SoTL is published:
The July 2009 issue of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning is now available online at http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v3n2.html. Authors are from from Australia, Canada, Fiji, Ireland, Korea, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. IJ-SoTL focuses upon teaching and learning in higher education in all disciplines.
For discussions about the July issue or other SoTL topics, join the IJ-SoTL listserv at http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/dl.htm.
Thank you.
AlanP.S. 3rd Annual SoTL Commons Conference (http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/conference/2010/index.htm) This very international conference will be held March 10-12, 2010 at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia (USA). Registration is
now open and the submission of proposals period is August 15 – October 15, 2009. Keynoters are Gary Poole (University of British Columbia, Canada), Kathleen McKinney (Illinois State University, USA), and Carolin Kreber (University of Edinburgh, UK).
When you look at the list of articles in this current issue, you find:
Perspectives on Online Teaching and Learning: A Report of Two Novice Online Educators
Dennis Conrad (State University of New York-Potsdam) & Joan Pedro (University of Hartford)Abstract: Population growth (Broad, 1997), institutional competition (Daniel & Cox, 2002), and changing learner needs (Willis, Tucker, & Gunn, 2003) are among the issues influencing the increase in online teaching and learning. Related to this, emergent and expanding distance learning technologies have subsequently pitted “brick and mortar” against “online” paradigms. This has resulted in a need for research to clarify the relevance, effectiveness, restrictive and facilitative dimensions of online courses. For example, faculty are increasingly expected and encouraged to develop and teach online courses often with misperceptions about required pedagogical skills and without adequate support and preparation (Choi & Park, 2006). This qualitative study is therefore, aimed at sharing the experiences and perspectives of two novice online instructors’ operating within two colleges in the eastern US. These instructors initially shared that a key motivation for the teaching of their online courses was fear of becoming professionally out of date and of ‘giving in’ to technophobia. This paper reports on the background to–and different approaches adopted towards–developing two online courses as well as providing student perceptions of their online learning experience. Findings and recommendations from this research are aimed at providing an insight into some of the fundamental issues that other novice ‘online’ instructors will need to consider in developing their own technology mediated courses.
Keywords: Online teaching, novice instructors, education, perspectives.
This particular research study, which they dub a “self and case study” – although I think they were more correct naming it a self-study, is focused on two higher education faculty. But having worked with a lot of novice K-12 online teachers, a lot of what I read in this article is very consistent with the experiences of those novice virtual and cyber school teachers.
If the article, or other items in their journal interest you, be sure to join their listserve to be able to participate in its discussion.
