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teachers have to deal with technical challenges
relating to the learning management system and other
technology that is used in the course.
The root cause of the third perceived weakness of
online courses is the lack of face to face interaction in
online courses. This poses several challenges both to
students and teachers. If the online course does not
encourage interaction between students, some
students might feel lonely and they do not have the
benefit of peer support. On the other hand, if online
courses require group work, online groups might be
difficult to manage.
For the teachers, totally online course poses also
several challenges. First, teachers find it difficult to
convey their own enthusiasm towards the topic of the
course in an online course. Second, some teachers
anticipated that it might be more difficult to identify
students who have difficulties understanding the
topic. Third, teachers find it more challenging to find
ways to assess to what degree the intended learning
outcomes are achieved in the online course. Finally,
since all the assignments and possible exams are done
online, teachers find that they cannot be 100% sure
who has actually done the assignments.
The perceived challenges of online teaching relate
also to teachers’ and universities’ set ways of thinking
and organizing teaching. For some teachers,
transferring own teaching from face to face teaching
model to an online teaching, is a big change. It
challenges teachers’ old ways of thinking and
organizing courses. In addition, online courses pose a
similar kind of challenge to the university as an
organization. The existing way how teaching related
[administrative] processes are organized is not
catering the needs of the online minor that is
organized as a joint effort of several universities.
Teachers who identified themselves as innovative
when it comes to adopting or creating new teaching
methods suggested in average 5,7 weaknesses of
online teaching. In contrary, teachers who were early
adopters or early majority adopters identified in
average 3,3 weaknesses. Innovators thus seem to be
slightly more aware of/have thought of more about
the challenges the online teaching poses to students,
teachers and the university.
6 DISCUSSION AND
CONCLUSIONS
Taking on the responsibility of planning and teaching
an online course as a part of a larger, national online
business minor initiative requires courage, technical
skills and online pedagogical skills from the teachers.
We conducted this pilot study to learn from this
process and be better informed about what kind of
support our online teachers might need in the future.
We posed two research questions for this first
ongoing research project: 1) To what degree the
teachers who take on the task of creating and teaching
an online course, are forerunners in adopting new
teaching methods and technology? And 2) How do
the teachers who are about to teach online business
courses perceive the strengths and weaknesses of
online courses?
The size of the data pool in this pilot study is small
and thus the results and the conclusions in this paper
should be treated as tentative. However, for sake of
the following phases of the bigger research project, it
was essential that we were able to get at least some
data before the teachers actually teach the courses.
This data gives us some ideas for what kind of
pedagogical and technical support and training novice
online teachers might benefit from.
Based on the preliminary analysis, the majority of
the eight teachers who answered the questionnaire
were either innovators, early adopters or early
majority adopters of new teaching methods. On the
contrary, the teachers were slightly more conservative
when it came to adopting new technology in general.
However, none of the teachers belonged to late
majority or laggards group. Based on the small data
set, the teaching experience and pedagogical studies
seem to be in relation to teachers’ eagerness to adopt
new teaching methods. In general, the more teaching
experience and pedagogical studies the teachers had
more often they were innovators or early adopters of
new teaching methods. Experience and pedagogical
studies have perhaps given teachers the confidence to
try new teaching methods.
Teachers identified several strengths and
weaknesses in online courses. Many of these
corroborate the pros and cons identified by others too
(Cook 2007; Fedynich 2013). For instance, different
embodiments of flexibility of teaching and studying
in online courses is often mentioned in the literature
and it was also the most often mentioned strength of
online courses in our data. Teachers identified also
weaknesses, such as a possibility for social isolation
and technical issues that are mentioned in the
literature.
However, some of the challenges that were not
mentioned in the literature but came up in our data
were: 1) There is a need for a change in teacher’s own
way of thinking about teaching and learning.
Teaching online challenges old perceptions that are
based on face to face teaching. 2) The rigidness of
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