EDET674 Virtual Teaching/Learning Week 10 Blog

Week 10 Blog Virtual Learning and Teaching EDET674

Essential Question: How can we manage the change that is inherent in our distance learning efforts?

            Distance education is bound to change whether the change is commercialization or globalization. A way that distance education can change is to have all virtual universities instead of physical universities. Instruction can have lower standards in order to not have to pay teachers so much. This idea supports commercialization of education in which the education system runs to help the economy therefore it is meant to educate the consumers of education to be consumers of goods and services. (Moore and Kearsley, 2012) Also technology being used in distance education can change and developed to be formatted differently. Looking back, distance education began with what millennials call snail mail. Now we are able to connect instantly and collaborate with others that live somewhere else and has a different culture from each other. To be able to stay up to date with these changes, professional development and support for each other will be key.

            Rasmussen & Byrd found in their research that professional development taken online is effective by keeping mind of the five key characteristics of PD (focus on teacher’s content and pedagogical knowledge, duration of at least 20 hours, promote collegiality and collaboration, an evaluation component, require participants to engage in activity) and actually the lessons that teachers learned through the PD were still being used after three years. A role that can play significant part of successful learning in professional development is the amount of experience the teacher has. “More experienced teachers tended to use PD materials longer, as they most likely are more familiar with their curriculum and, therefore, may be more ready to implement new materials.” (Rasmussen & Byrd, 2016) For me as a new teacher, I need to pair myself up with more experienced teachers and work alongside them to implement the new methods learned in my class so that I can adopt the change that is coming and here.

            Lastly, I think we need to focus our support to online teachers for K-12 students. By learning how to support these teachers, we may be learning how we can support ourselves someday if education becomes to be more online than it is now. There is a gap between full-time online K-12 teachers who generally get paid less than a teacher employed by a district and also have to work 12 months of the year versus 9 months. (Larkin et al. 2016) This is one small part of what online teachers face and we need to be aware and support these teachers.

           

Larkin, I. M., Brantley-Dias, L., & Lokey-Vega, A. (2016). Job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention of online teachers in the K-12 setting. Online Learning, Volume 20, Issue 3.

Moore, M. G. & Kearsley, G. (2012). Distance Education: A system view of online learning. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Rasmussen, C. L. & Byrd, D. R. (2016). Evaluating continued use of an online teacher professional development program with a sustained implementation scale. Journal of Online Learning Research (2)2, 145-167.