Why is online teaching important? Video Lecture | Teach Online: A Comprehensive Approach for Teaching Online - Professional Skills

this episode provides a brief summary of
how the way we learn is changing now
increasingly digital society we look at
ways that institutions can begin to meet
this challenge and also highlight the
benefits of teaching online the
importance of maintaining a balance
between face-to-face and online learning
practices and also some ideas about how
institutions can start to support their
academics when they're trying online
teaching for the first time probably the
most significant challenge that we face
in higher education at the moment comes
from the fact that the internet is
changing the way knowledge work is done
in society the way we learn in our
society is of course based around
communication and the way society
operates is that more and more of our
communication is digital in the trend of
the work now like we connect with each
other and we have to be updated and in
the right time so touching your life is
the only way I don't think we as a as a
set of institutions of learning can
afford not to be exploring and
developing our strategies to be in
sympathy with those that our students
are naturally adopting through their own
engagement with these technologies
outside of the university
one of the most obvious benefits is
flexibility of delivery and that's
that's one of the widely touted ones
where we deliver curriculum when we
deliver it how we deliver it it cetera
so it's both rich in terms of local
national international obviously and
it's also richness of spirit of
experience the capacity to work
cross-disciplinary to work cross campus
and also to enable students and more
diverse learning experience they not
only enable us to access information
they enable us to share information they
enable us to create communities of
common interests they enable us to
facilitate communication between those
communities of interest
I like to think of the educational
experience in universities now as a
blended learning experience that's a
term that's commonly used and I think
it's a challenge for universities to
figure out how to get that blend right
what I realized is that it changed the
the way the fixed dynamics of the
lecture of presenting material and
students discussing it in classes we
were able in the mid-90s to start using
the Internet to to change the way we use
the on-campus time for a much more
productive learning outcome really it's
one space it's a learning space that
we're talking about which has a physical
component and a virtual component and
the two are complementary and integrated
into each other in an ideal environment
it's a large change and a rapid change
but one that's essential to move with
the technology expectation of our
students in some ways it's got to be
both incremental and radical and it also
needs to be flexible enough to respond
to what's coming over the horizon this
is not an optional extra now this is not
a case of the university saying oh how
can we cut costs I think we've got to
keep the question of why use the
technology and how can we use the
technology to support learning teaching
at the forefront of all of our thinking
and in terms of development of strategy
here it's a multi-pronged approach I
think and and as part of that culture
there needs to be strong leadership at
the university level the university
vice-chancellor or deputy
vice-chancellor providing identifiable
leadership over the direction of the
university in the technology area is
essential it can be problematic via
senior management I'm not fully behind
what it is you're trying to do in terms
of an online profile for your
institution to have an institution which
is formalized that got their courses
together got the structure together got
the team there to produce the courses
simply means you're in advance of the
kind of trend you're in advance of
what's kind of happening anyway it is
hard for staff to see the reasons for
change and they need to in their own way
see those reasons before engaging with
professional development I think if you
were to say that academics can be told
to do something you're in a different
planet so while the students can
appreciate and understand and protect
potentially envisage the potential for
the use of technologies in learning and
teaching many of our staff don't once
people are accepting that that's the
primary objective then it's a case of
developing their understanding of what a
good learning environment would be so
it's not something that can be dictated
because people teach in the way that
they think is best universities have a
real obligation to stop running training
courses in systems and telling academics
how to do things universities need to
get
back to where we were maybe 10 or 15
years ago which was to see staff
development as a genuine developmental
exercise in which time and resources and
money are put into helping staff
innovate become sophisticated Internet
users in their teaching and to
appreciate that there'll be an
intangible return on that freedom to
develop the academic staff which is
mostly seen in the way that academics
then help other academics to become
sophisticated and even expert in these
fields
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