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

Maria Northcote

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 & …

Threshold Concepts And Attitudes In Mathematics Education: Listening To Students' Past, Present And Projected Stories, Maria T. Northcote

Maria Northcote

The process of becoming a skilled and confident mathematics teacher can be strongly influenced by the teacher's attitudes to both mathematics and mathematics teaching. Investigations into the attitudes of pre-service teachers have shown that teachers' attitudes directly influence their teaching practices and, subsequently, their students' learning experiences. Teachers' understanding of mathematical content and concepts also impact on the quality of teaching. Hence, the identification of threshold concepts and attitudes associated with teaching mathematics can be beneficial to pre-service teachers and their students. By understanding the concepts associated with teaching mathematics to young children, pre-service teachers come to transcend their lack …

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

Maria Northcote

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 …

Cross-Continental Research Collaborations About Online Teaching, Kevin P. Gosselin, Maria T. Northcote

Maria Northcote

Increasingly, faculty academics are required to teach and design online courses. However, in many cases, faculty members report having low levels of confidence, self-efficacy and competence to teach in online environments. Although their professional learning is often enhanced by institutional support strategies such as workshops, online instruction and mentoring systems, many faculty academics learn through “just-in-time” rather than “just-in-case” strategies. This paper reports on the findings from a cross-continental research project between researchers in two higher education institutions in the United States and Australia. The project was initiated to: 1) determine the learning needs of faculty members who teach online …

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

Maria Northcote

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 …