Resources for Learning to Teach Online

The following resources (courses, OER, videos, etc.) are all freely available. I haven’t vetted most of them other than reading their descriptions.

Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19: Faculty Playbook “Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19 is a faculty-focused playbook intended to improve course design, teaching, and learning in online environments. With special attention to the needs of instructors teaching online for the first time, the guide offers strategies for getting started and improving over time.”

Remote Teaching: A Practical Guide with Tools, Tips, and Techniques OER by Allison Flynn and Jeremy Kerr

Fundamentals of Online Teaching “The community of inquiry (CoI) model outlines essential elements of meaningful learning experiences. The purpose of this badge track is to use the CoI model to support instructors in the successful facilitation of online learning experiences. The competencies include myths of online teaching and learning, the CoI model, social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. To earn the badge, all five competencies must be completed.”

Future Learn has 11 different courses about teaching online

Promising Practices in Online Teaching and Learning “Promising Practices in Online Teaching and Learning was designed to provide information on planning, designing, producing, and managing online instruction. We can help you with planning, course design, and production needs. To help you become familiar with some practices that you might want to consider in your distance courses, we want you to gain experience as a student and as a course producer. We have combined both of these roles in this course Promising Practices in Teaching and Learning Online. We want you to learn practical techniques for teaching and learning while gaining experience using Blackboard. TWU’s Office of Lifelong Learning will award the TWU Distance Education Faculty Certificate, Level 1 after successful completion of the course.”

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository “The University of Central Florida’s (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) offers the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) as a public resource for faculty and instructional designers interested in online and blended teaching strategies. Each entry describes a strategy drawn from the pedagogical practice of online/blended teaching faculty, depicts this strategy with artifacts from actual courses, and is aligned with findings from research or professional practice literature.”

Learning to Teach Online “The Learning to Teach Online project is a free professional development resource designed to help teachers from any discipline, whether experienced in online teaching or not, to gain a working understanding of successful online teaching pedagogies that they can apply in their own unique teaching situations.”

e-Learning Ecologies: Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning for the Digital Age “For three decades and longer we have heard educators and technologists making a case for the transformative power of technology in learning. However, despite the rhetoric, in many ways and at most institutional sites, education is still relatively untouched by technology. Even when technologies are introduced, the changes sometimes seem insignificant and the results seem disappointing. If the print textbook is replaced by an e-book, do the social relations of knowledge and learning necessarily change at all or for the better? If the pen-and-paper test is mechanized, does this change the nature of our assessment systems? Technology, in other words, need not necessarily bring significant change. Technology might not even represent a step forward in education.

12 Key Ideas: An Introduction to Teaching Online OER by Dave Cornier that includes the video series below. “This course is an attempt to re-frame the idea of what it means to start teaching online. It will not give you a step by step process to create a syllabus or tell you what buttons to press. The intent of this course is to present you with online learning as a conceptual challenge.”

Teaching Online series of 2-4 minute videos from Dave Cormier

Top 10 Rules for Developing Your First Online Course Blog post from John Orlando

Image credit: “Online Education” by Steve_Illustrated is licensed under CC BY 2.0