Welcome video transcript
Hello, and welcome to First Steps in Teaching and Learning. We are bringing this course to you because we love teaching. It is almost as simple as that. And we hope you bring some of your own pleasure in teaching and learning to the course also. Of course that is not the only reason. We also believe that there are a wide range of skills that can be acquired to help improve teaching.
You will meet the tutors and me throughout the course. You will also meet a selection of guest speakers during our webinars. But most importantly you will meet other participants from around the world. We hope this course helps develop, grow and strengthen our professional networks.
This is a course about teaching in higher education. It is not about online teaching, though it is delivered online. This course is about teaching in all modes. Among the questions we will inevitably discuss is what might it mean to be in “higher” education? You might want to start thinking about this now.
The course is taught through dialogue and interaction with people. It is an open course. That does mean that you are free to make your own way through the curriculum and to engage with the activities in your own way. Have a look at the introduction to the platform video to get some ideas as to how you might engage with the course.
We will make suggestions about how we think you might get the best out of it, but one of our key design principles presumes that autonomous learning is important in higher education. The course is designed around the four principles of: autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity. The course aims to foster these principles in your own learning practice and indeed we hope that you would in turn foster these in your own students.
The course is structured around five topics and four key activities. Each topic will involve discussion in forums with the whole course and each activity will provide the opportunity to engage in discussions (synchronous and asynchronous) with large and small groups.
For now let me just say on behalf of the whole team, welcome to the course!
