Online teacher development: collaborating in a virtual learning environment

Over recent years educational institutions have been making increasing use of virtual environments to set up collaborative activities for learners. While it is recognized that teachers play an important role in facilitating learner collaboration online they may not have the necessary skills to do so successfully. Thus, a small scale professional development programme was set up and piloted by two distance universities. The aims were to develop teachers’ experience of online group work; to trial a set of pilot activities which would raise awareness of factors contributing to successful collaborative online activity; and to identify professional development needs in this area. This article reports on the hands-on experience of a group of 20 teachers, examines some of the competences that are needed to successfully collaborate in virtual environments, and presents the skills that teachers need to foster online collaborative learning in the virtual classroom. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected, examining the levels of participation among participants, the collaborative activity of two groups, and teacher perception of the collaboration which took place. The skills identified include planning and managing the collaboration, designing appropriate activities, giving clear instructions and getting students to negotiate ground rules for participation, moderating at the right level, and choosing the right environment and the appropriate tool(s). While this study was carried out with language teachers, many of the findings are applicable to other subject areas where growing emphasis is placed on the development of collaborative skills

Developing teacher skills to support collaborative online language learning

The significance of collaborative learning through social interaction and interdependence is widely recognised in the social constructivist perspective on learning and the ability to work collaboratively is a core graduate skill. The importance of online learning systems has been widely recognised, with the arrival of new Web 2.0 environments greatly enhancing opportunities for fostering increased peer interaction, collaboration and learner autonomy. However, although many language teachers are keen to exploit these possibilities, their training and experience may not have equipped them to develop and support collaborative learning or to adapt to the different teacher roles required. This paper describes a project between the Department of Languages at The Open University (UK) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, which gave a group of teachers practical experience of organising and engaging in collaborative online language learning in order to understand how it feels in practice. The experience of the participants was explored via a semi-structured questionnaire and interviews in order to produce some guidelines for teacher development to support collaborative learning

La educación en la era de la informática: Qué da resultado y qué no

En este libro se presentan los temas discutidos durante el Seminario "La educación en la era de la informática", realizado en Cartagena, Colombia en julio de 1997. El evento fue organizado por el BID y la Comisión Mundial para la Infraestructura de la Información.