An Introduction to Effective Online Teaching for Elementary and Secondary Instructors

Abstract

This course examines the theoretical foundations of teaching and learning, and how that theory informs the design and delivery of online instruction. The course utilizes a textbook that is entitled, “How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice” by Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick (2020). Kirschner and Hendrick’s book is organized around a set of 28 significant studies in educational psychology that illuminate different aspects of how learning takes place. Each week, students in this course will read one or two of these seminal articles and discuss its implications for online education.

This course is unlike other courses that aspire to teach online teaching methods to elementary and secondary teachers. Many courses of this type tend to be technology-centred. They review a wide variety of different instructional technologies and explore how K-12 teachers might incorporate those technologies in their lessons.

This course takes a more learning-centred path. It begins with a close examination of the learning process. We ask the question, “How do people learn things?” As we develop an understanding of how learning occurs, we then apply this knowledge to online teaching and learning contexts. Given what we know about how people think and learn, how can we most effectively design online learning activities?

The 12 Units in this course are organized around some of the foundational cognitive research about thinking and learning. You can think of it as a review of some of the “greatest hits” of educational psychology research over the past 50 years, and what we’ve learned from the body of research that has emerged. It includes topics like cognitive load, depth of processing, retrieval practice, prior knowledge, advance organizers, dual coding, and so forth. Students study each of these topics and consider the implications for effective online teaching and learning.