Education Commons^™

Threshold Concepts About Online Teaching: Progress Report On A Five Year Project, Kevin P. Gosselin, Maria T. Northcote, Daniel Reynaud, Peter W. Kilgour, Malcolm Anderson, Chris Boddey

Daniel Reynaud

The burgeoning expansion of online education has presented the challenges of articulating an appropriate pedagogy for online education (Stevens, 2003; Runnels et al., 2006; Gosselin, 2009) while also contending with perceived and real deficits in lecturer competence (Shephard, 2007). Conceptually, the identified areas of concern are viewed as troublesome knowledge (Perkins, 1999), or knowledge that is counter intuitive to traditional teaching face to face teaching. To meet the emerging difficulties of new modes of distance teaching, researchers have focused on transformative learning using threshold concepts, or new portals, that allow understanding of concepts through new modes of thinking (Meyer & …

Navigating Learning Journeys Of Online Teachers: Threshold Concepts And Self-Efficacy, Maria T. Northcote, Kevin P. Gosselin, Daniel Reynaud, Peter W. Kilgour, Malcolm Anderson

Daniel Reynaud

Higher education institutions are developing more and more online courses to supplement and augment the courses they offer in on-campus modes. In fact, some universities now offer the majority of their courses through online contexts. However, for academic staff who design and teach these courses, the transition from teaching on-campus courses to teaching in online learning environments is not always speedy or smooth. Academic teaching staff require support, mentoring and professional learning programs to develop their existing capacities and apply them to an online context.

This paper reports on Phase 2 of a research project, which takes into consideration the …

Bumpy Moments And Joyful Breakthroughs: The Place Of Threshold Concepts In Academic Staff Development Programs About Online Learning And Teaching, Maria T. Northcote, Daniel Reynaud, Peter Beamish, Tony Martin, Kevin P. Gosselin

Daniel Reynaud

In this article the authors address the situation in higher education of academic staff facing what they conceptualise as “bumpy moments and joyful breakthroughs” as they work through the process of becoming teachers in online learning environments. The article comes from a research project, which gathered and analysed data from systematic observations and questionnaires. The authors base their study on the known fact that while many academics have grounded experience in on-campus teaching and learning situations they do not necessarily have the skills required today for extending learning through on-line environments. The authors discover that when academics start teaching in …