PST Online: Learner voices guiding learning design
Online teaching has become more pervasive throughout the 21st century, partly a result of new technologies allowing for interactive online learning environments and partly to meet the needs of students who cannot access traditional face-to-face classrooms for all or part of their schooling. Pre-service teacher education has lagged behind this uptake in online teaching, failing to prepare new graduate teachers for the possibility of teaching wholly online to students in a range of learning environments. Pre-Service Teachers Online is a website designed to address this gap by providing pre-service teachers with resources to assist in building online teaching skills. Current pre-service teachers' awareness of online teaching skills were sought, providing the foundation for the website. Presented is how the website was designed to meet identified pre-service teachers' needs allowing participants to reflectively consider how their current perceptions of teaching practices could apply in a blended or fully online classroom model.
PST Online: Preparing pre-service teachers for teaching in virtual schools
Improvements in available technologies and an increased popularity of online learning spaces have seen a shift in the dominant ways students engage with formal and informal learning in their day-to-day lives. This is especially true for the distance education experience through the rise in virtual schools. As this shift occurs, it becomes increasingly important to reflect these new changes in curriculum design for pre-service teachers. Increasingly, these pre-service teachers will be engaging with students, not just in the traditional, physical classroom space, but also in online spaces and via distance. These new virtual learning environments require their own separate skillset to be properly navigated by both the learner and teacher to provide meaningful and rich learning experiences. In order to develop resources to facilitate the learning of these skills, current pre-service teachers have identified their own understandings of online learning and their readiness to teach within these new spaces.
PST Online: Meeting the Need for Teaching Innovation for Virtual Schools
Virtual schools are no longer a pipedream: they are already with us. Pre-service teachers need to be prepared for this alternate teaching medium. Unlike blended learning in the classroom, new virtual schools have no need for physical classrooms, and students can be geographically distant from both each other and the teacher. This change in education delivery in schools will necessitate a new approach to curriculum design accompanied by a reshaping of discipline-based courses in higher education institutions in regard to teacher education. Exclusively online teaching changes the teacher/student dynamics and new skills, techniques and strategies should be developed. While there has been some online teaching for many years, initial teacher education has not prepared students for this new way of teaching. In this article the authors present the conceptual underpinning of the need for changes in teacher education and the perceptions of pre-service teachers in terms of their preparedness for virtual teaching. The data from a survey conducted with these pre-service teachers will inform the development of online resources that are part of a funded, ongoing project.