What are the key roles and responsibilities of an effective online teacher?

Dr. Michael Wilmore
Senior Lecturer in Media, University of Adelaide

We have a much greater responsibility to be the face of our institution. We take a little bit more of the burden of being the face of the university that we're teaching within, because the people we're teaching may not necessarily have a lot of contact with other students and other staff members. They may not come on to the campus very frequently, if at all. So we certainly have a much greater responsibility to really be the face of the institution, the face of the programme, the face of the course that we're teaching, and act accordingly to make sure that we give students the kind of support that they really need in order to become effective learners.

Clark Shah-Nelson
Senior Instructional Designer and Team Lead, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

It's really important for the instructor to first of all have the course well designed from the get go so students come into the course and it's ready to go, and second of all to be really available and accessible to the students during the course.

Dr. D. Randy Garrison
Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Calgary

In effect, all I teach, very succinctly, is to set the climate and lead the academic discourse. In the Community of Inquiry framework, this corresponds to social presence and cognitive presence.

Can you give an example of a practical challenge you have experienced in your online teaching?

Clark Shah-Nelson: So one challenge I experienced with online teaching had to do with technology, and in fact I was trying to have students do oral exams and using a pretty new Web 2.0 technology for them to do this. So they would have to have a microphone, and record themselves speaking into the microphone, and then submit this, you know, to me using the learning management system. So a lot of students had trouble getting the audio working, getting it figured out and so on, and it caused some problems in being able to assess them on this particular skill. So one of the ways that I solved that was actually taking a step back in technology and just using voicemail, because all the students had phones. So instead of using this, sort of, newfangled Web 2.0, you know fancy technology that was kind of fairly easy to do but a little bit difficult, I took a step back and allowed those who could do it easily to do it that way or for the others to use voicemail to do it.

I guess what's really important is to think about your target audience, your students, and where they are with technology, and what types of things they're going to be able to easily do or less easily do, what support they're going to need, and support is extremely important.

Away from practical challenges, what concerns have you encountered in online teaching?

Dr. Michael Wilmore: I teach in the humanities, and I know from my own experience and also from talking with colleagues that there can sometimes be a little bit of concern around some of the restrictions that we might face given the type of teaching that we do. The humanities is, of course, from its inception many centuries ago as a discipline, all about debate. It's all about argument, it's all about discourse, and so there's naturally a bit of concern that when we're teaching online and we're no longer able to meet students face-to-face across a table, that we're going to lose some of those things that are absolutely essential to what we do within the humanities.

How do you respond to these concerns?

I think some of those fears are a little bit misplaced, because of course, often the online technologies that are available to us now can actually enhance what we're doing as traditional classroom-based teachers. We can use some of those technologies to ensure that students, when they actually come to the classroom, are much better prepared to actually engage in those exciting dialogues and debates that we want to have within the classroom.

Equally, when we're using those technologies for fully online learning, we've got a whole series of technologies that we can use both to have live synchronous debates and conversations with our students, we can use virtual classrooms for that, but at the same time we can also extend those debates over a much longer period of time. We can use some technologies like discussion boards. We can use social media, to actually engage in debates asynchronously, so that we can actually make sure that those debates don't just end when we leave the classroom. And we give every single student – no matter where they're based globally – we can give every single student an opportunity to get involved in some of those exciting debates and discussions that we love to have within the humanities.