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Teaching and Learning
Online learning has far reaching implications for both teachers and students. Online learning provides opportunities for students to take courses not offered in their school and to collaborate with a wide range of learners.Teachers designing online courses must consider pedagogical differences, alternative ways to communicate, changes in relationships with students, and their roles as instructors. Students must consider what it means to learn in this environment, how to be good digital citizens, and how to take more responsibility for their learning. Since online learning provides a potentially powerful option to expand the strength and reach of independent schools, it will be important to leverage these new technologies and delivery mediums for the purpose of enhancing or improving teaching methods and supporting student learning.
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1. How does online learning impact the traditional classroom?
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2. Who can “teach” an online course?
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3. What tools should teachers and students be taking advantage of?
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4. How does the plethora of “web 2.0″ tools change what teachers can do with students?
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5. How can we use these tools to help students demonstrate what they know and understand?
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6. How closely are we monitoring the impact of online, computer, and other educational technologies on brain development?
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7. How does online learning allow teachers to enhance learning in other ways?
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8. How do we prepare our students for distributed learning and distributed cognition?
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9. What skills do students demonstrate proficiency in? Are there desired skill sets?
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10. What is the most effective way to supplement current practices with online offerings or does online learning need to be a completely separate initiative? What are the Essential Conditions for either model in an independent school?
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11. Does online learning which engages students across schools and borders, open up opportunities for collaborative experiences that are often not possible during a “bricks and mortar” day?
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12. Will online learning change the students we serve? If, for example, schools begin an online program, is the audience/student base completely different from who we currently serve?
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13. If our self-motivated students opt to get an online degree, how different will the students we serve be?
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14. How do we design online learning that serves a broad range of learning styles and needs?
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15. Have teachers experienced online learning from the perspective of being a student within an online course?
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16. Does the online learning experience incorporate a variety of student groupings (partners, small groups, teams, etc.) for instruction?
Bryan Garman
Brad Rathgeber
Cathy Cavanaugh
Regina Brown
Bruce Stewart
Dolly Ryan, Director of Technology
Very good set of questions. They’ll get people thinking about how technology might improve or, better yet, transform teaching and learning. I like the question on the implied change in the role of the teacher.
You may want to have a question about professional development in here.
These are very broad questions, which is an effective way to get thinking and discussion going. I’d be interested in knowing more about respondents’ conception of an effective online/blended course: is it individualized, group-based, teacher-led, competency-based, holistic in its aims…? This question is important because of the national tension between richly teacher-facilitated courses and automated online tutorial-style “courses”.
I’d also be interested in learning about levels of blending that respondents envision and their implications for school policy, teacher development, scheduling, etc. These are roughly assignment/activity level, course level, student level, program level and school level.
Another topic of national concern is the use of open education resources, identifying them, evaluating, them using them, and creating them, and the impacts on costs, efficiency in course development, and quality of instruction.
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