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:

  1. Encourages Contacts Between Students and Faculty
  2. Develops Reciprocity and Cooperation Among Students
  3. Uses Active Learning Techniques
  4. Gives Prompt Feedback
  5. Emphasizes Time on Task
  6. Communicates High Expectations
  7. 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:

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:

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:

References