Online Teaching: Questions

Here's one:

How can UPOU better prepare affiliate faculty members and newly hired fulltime faculty to effectively teach online--using both asynchronous and synchronous learning networks?


This study will require:
-a historical review of faculty trainings/workshops; faculty support systems which look into faculty needs to help them teach better
-a profile of current affiliate facs
-needs assessment
-a look into frameworks of teacher preparedness to do online teaching
-arguments for strengths of blended learning in undergraduate programs and professional development/ in service training to provide justification why we need to prepare fac members to do synchronous and asynchronous, to include use of a variety of platforms
-other surrounding factors or areas to look into when it comes to preparing teachers to teach online--including perceptions of online teaching and learning--and how these can be factored into the design of in service faculty development to improve online teaching


This study shall feed into:
How we can prepare BES teachers to teach online--using both asynchronous and synchronous teaching
How we can prepare other prospective teachers to teach in virtual classrooms using a variety of tools (Future Virtual High School teachers)


Other thoughts:
-mounting the curr for VHS is plausible, feasible due to availability of online tools--BUT, the big BUT--where do you get good teachers to teach it? how to design and improve pre service education of prospective online teachers?

WHY IS MY STUDY ON TEACHING PRESENCE at WIZIQ a STEP in the RIGHT DIRECTION?

This study looks into TEACHING PRESENCE= design and organization, facilitating discourse, direct instruction. Most faculty development activities at UPOU delve on design and organization of instruction, not much into direct facilitation as our main platform such as MOODLE greatly operate on this need. However, running synchronous classes could be one area we yet to explore especially with the upcoming implementation of BES for our undergraduates.

What is sorely overlooked is (social presence hence my earlier paper on sense of community) and facilitation + direct instruction. We need to significantly examine these areas if we are to prepare undergraduates to become online teachers. Using MOODLE alone can be limited and limiting. Using live classes may be an area of strength we have yet to explore if we mean to model good teaching to our students.

This study will look into other indicators of Teaching Presence in SLN which may not be surfaced in prior studies of teaching presence which are largely aligned with ALN.

For selfish reasons, this study will precisely take me there because in the end, I would want myself as a professor and my future students to have an enriching and meaningful experience in online teaching and learning so they themselves will become better teachers.

For UPOU, this study on Teacher Presence & WizIQ can present better tools and ways to make online teaching and learning happen.

For the bigger research community, I honestly do not know and perhaps do not care, yet! I mean, it's the least of my worries to satisfy the standards of what scholars deem to be worthy of research...or should I? Hmmm...how then?