Introduction

This book was created to support instructors at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) to teach online. The book in its entirety is used to support POLY 1025 Fostering Learning Online, part of the Associate Certificate in Polytechnic Teaching.^[1]  It is meant to be used as notes to support the activities that take place in that course, rather than exist as a stand-alone textbook.

You might not be teaching at BCIT but the contents will still be useful to you, especially if you are teaching in a vocational, technical and professional education setting. One of the advantages of focusing on a particular teaching institution is that it provides specific context for the teaching decisions that we make.

Looking ahead to future initiatives, I have intentionally organized this book so that units may be drawn independently of it to support more narrowly focused faculty development opportunities. As with anything to do with teaching, the categories are never neatly bordered.

Online teaching in the context of this book means an instructor is facilitating learning that is mediated by an online learning environment. As such, I focus on using specific tools that are typically available in digital learning spaces such as discussion forums and web-conferencing tools. With these tools, instructors must lean on their teaching skills to interact with their students in a way that using other tools, such as a quiz tool, do not. Therefore, this book focuses on the areas of online learning that require instructors to respond to emergent and dynamic learning environments.

The book is divided into 5 units as follows:

Unit 1: Building and Sustaining Community Online

In this unit, the Community of Inquiry framework is introduced in order to provide the conceptual language of good online learning experiences and what they might look like when applied to practice.

Unit 2: What’s Online: Defining and Designing Digital Learning Spaces

It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss online course design but online course design is an integral element to how a course gets taught. The different course delivery modes are discussed in this unit, and a brief overview is shared that describes a course development process based on quality concepts.

Unit 3: Being an Online Instructor

This unit is divided into two parts. The first part is about the instructing-side of being an online instructor: pedagogies conducive to the affordances of the online environment and providing feedback to students through assessment and evaluation. The second part of the unit offers typical practices in providing support and assigning tasks that lead to positive student learning outcomes.

Unit 4: Planning and Facilitating Effective Synchronous Learning

Post-pandemic (2020-2022), synchronous learning opportunities via web-conferencing tools have been demystified to the extent of becoming normalized. This unit attempts to provide some advice on good practices.

Unit 5: Planning and Facilitating Effective Asynchronous Learning

Back in the early days of online learning, online discussion forums changed forever the students’ experience in traditional correspondence courses by making student-to-student interaction possible. This unit shares the good practices and teaching techniques learned over the decades.