What do online educators need?

Photo by Steinar Engeland on unsplash

In yesterday's post I wrote about how teachers are beginning to use online forms of education to enhance and extend the reach of schools.

Distance education in all its forms has been used for more than a century in education, leveraging the potential of each new technology as it emerges. Correspondence course, radio, television, video, the Web, computers and smart phones - each in turn has been harnessed to reach students for education that are traditionally outside of the traditional learning space.

I also mentioned in my last post that I had been involved in a very large school distance education project where teachers were expected to use new technologies to extend their traditional classrooms into non-traditional learning spaces across geographical distance. The disruption this created was largely due to lack of knowledge and skills, along with raised expectations about what was required. There was a wide spectrum of responses, from fervent adoption through to vehement rejection of the idea.

The bottom line for online education is schools today though, is how prepared teachers are to adopt new online educational practices. The question is over what teachers need, in terms of knowledge, skills and disposition, to be able to make a success of such a radical change in pedagogy. The first question therefore is:

What do teachers need to know and do, to be able to successfully transition into, and harness the potential of, online education?

What do online educators need? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's