Teaching in an Online Learning Context - bibliografia anotada

Anderson, Terry (2008). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. In Anderson, Terry (Ed), Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University: Au Press (2ª Edição).

In the own words of the authors, the book starts analyzing the foundation of education theory for online learning, by discussing the contributions of behaviorism to teach the facts (what), cognitivism the principles and processes (how), constructivism the real-life and personal applications that contextualize learning, and connectivity with its capacity to exploit the connections to knowledge and to people afforded by the now ubiquitous Internet and its applications. And the book continues covering the necessary infrastructure to produce and delivery quality distance online learning and its alignment with changing student needs, technologies, and curricula, including the use of mobile technologies to support teaching, learning, and research. After this theoretical an infrastructural part, the book continues on operations, design, and production of online courses with quality presenting the role of instructional media developers in the course development process and Multimedia Instructional Design Editor (MIDE) in facilitating the communication between the author and the learner, pedagogical standards, quality assurance issues, library and the call centre concept for course delivery and student support in online courses. Finally, the book focuses on the role of the teacher or tutor in an online learning context, it uses a theoretical model developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) that compares learning and teaching in an online environment with in any other formal educational context: learner’s needs are assessed, content is negotiated or prescribed, learning activities are orchestrated and learned is assessed, the difference between them is the online medium, particularly its capacity for shifting the time and place of the educational interaction, the ability to support content encapsulated in many multimedia formats, the capacity of the net to access huge repositories of content on every conceivable subject and to support human and machine interaction in both asynchronous and synchronous modalities. References Garrison, R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in text based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2–3), 87–105. The book is a very relevant one because of the importance of the author and the comprehensive content, which still includes a framework, bringing practicability to the reader. In a so large amount of information provided by this book, I decided to focus on the role of the teacher or tutor in an online learning context according Terry Anderson, who refers to the theoretical model mentioned in the last paragraph of the description, which views the creation of an effective online educational community as involving three critical components: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence expressed in the model as a detailed framework. Teaching presence is the educational experience’s part I would like to highlight , which is related to, at first, providing structure and process which is taking care of designing and organizing the learning experience before and during the operation of the learning community, at second, encouraging discourse between students, the teacher, groups of students and content resources, and finally, at third, going beyond moderating, adding subject-matter expertise through a variety forms of direct instruction. Chapter 14 explains each one of these three items. The book shows in details all the framework, which is very practical and usable.