Week 4 reading: models of good practice in teaching online
In face-to-face teaching interactions there are hundreds if not thousands of years of tradition on which to draw to facilitate the establishment of a channel of communication: bells ring, the lecturer clears her throat or shouts, "Oy, you! in the back. Yes, you! Are we quite ready? Thank you!" The chairs in the room are oriented in a certain way to reinforce certain channels and damp others: theatre style, open U, boardroom table. There may be communication aids: black or white boards, OHPs or data projectors. Similarly, the establishment of relationships is facilitated by years of tradition and mediated by the channels of communication; none the less, if "old garlic breath is going to drone on about golf again, I'm out of here". We draw on a deep tradition of knowledge, most of which is tacit. This tacit knowledge of face-to-face learning interactions might need some re-conceptualisation when we move into the online world. As Robin Mason (2001) said, often the first time we question the meaning and form of teaching at all is when we try to adopt new learning technologies.
We have already engaged with two models of good practice in online learning in this course: Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage model and Janet Macdonald’s model of blended and online learning. The introduction to Week 4 illustrated how inventories of good practice might be articulated based on these models. Here are some other inventories of good practice in online teaching to think about.
Seven principles of effective teaching
In 1987 Chickering and Gamson (1987) published their now well known ‘Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.’ In the late 1990s Chickering and Ehrmann published a paper that examined how these principles could be interpreted as good practice in online teaching (Chickering and Ehrmann 1996). That paper has been developed as an online resource with numerous examples of how the principles can be implemented using technology (see "Seven Principles" Collection of Ideas for Teaching and Learning with Technology). Here are the original seven principles.
Good Practice:
- Encourages Contacts Between Students and Faculty
- Develops Reciprocity and Cooperation Among Students
- Uses Active Learning Techniques
- Gives Prompt Feedback
- Emphasizes Time on Task
- Communicates High Expectations
- Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning
Community of Inquiry (CoI)
Garrison, Anderson & Archer developed their Communities of Inquiry model in the early 2000s. It is a collaborative/constructivist framework originally developed for primarily text-based online educational environments that consists of three interdependent elements – social, cognitive and teaching presence. These three aspects lead (arguably) to the following inventory:
A community of inquiry aims to develop the ability of participants to:
- identify with the learning community
- communicate purposefully in a trusting environment
- develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities
- realise personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes
- construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse
Excellent online instructor
Palloff and Pratt have published several books about learning and teaching online, including one (2011) on how to be an excellent online tutor. You can listen to a podcast (approx. 15 mins) of them discussing the key elements, which we summarise here as:
The excellent online tutor:
- is extremely visible to their students, establishing real presence as a real person
- is responsive to their students
- is respectful of their learners as partners in the learning process
- is comfortable enough with the technology they are using to facilitate learning with it and to assist learners to use it effectively too
- is knowledgeable enough about educational technologies to be able to select appropriate learning technologies for varying learning objectives
- is flexible and willing to try new things
Further trails to follow
As we’ve already alluded to, there are many concepts and theories about online learning out there. If you feel that none of the ones we’ve looked at so far provides a ‘good fit’ or you’d like to satisfy your curiosity a bit more, then you could follow other trails laid out in the 2013 Association for Learning Technologies (ALT) MOOC Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL). The first week of ocTEL was titled ‘TEL Concepts and Approaches’ and it offers links to follow on:
- Connectivism
- Eric Mazur’s peer instruction
- Socratic Method
- Communities of Practice (Etienne Wenger)
- Paulo Freire
- Ivan Illich
- Social Constructivism
- Actor Network Theory
- Emergent Learning Model
References
- Chickering, A. and Ehrmann, S. C. (1996). "Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever." AAHE Bulletin October 1996: 3-6.
- Chickering, A. W. and Gamson, Z. F. (1987). "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." AAHE Bulletin March 1987: 3-7.
- Garrison, D. R. (2011). Community of inquiry, [Online] Retrieved 18 June 2013 from http://communitiesofinquiry.com/welcome
- Mason, R. (2001). "E-learning: what have we learnt?".Improving Student Learning Using Learning Technology, edited by C. Rust: proceedings of the 2001 ninth International Improving Student Learning Symposium, Herriot-Watt University. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff & Learning Development, pp 27-34
- Palloff, R. M. and Pratt, K. (2011). The Excellent Online Instructor: Strategies for Professional Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass