In the Attempt of Approaching Online Teaching from Multiple Perspectives

 

In the Attempt of Approaching Online Teaching from Multiple Perspectives

Due to the pandemic situation that is hitting the world, teaching online has become a necessity rather than a trend. For this reason, there is an increasing number of experts in education who are exploring this new perspective of education and who need support in finding simpler and more efficient ways of being successful in the technological-mediated training.  In the book The theory and practice of online teaching and learning: A guide for academic professionals, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group (n.d.) examine the essential features of teaching online in comparison with onsite instruction. While this book describes significant aspects showing that an online orientation program could be perfectly employed in groups of all ages in more complex modalities, some limitations related to generalization of concepts and out-of-reality samples can be identified.

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group (n.d.) offer practical tips and give some advice for teachers who struggle with the idea of teaching online. Throughout six chapters, the authors explore how education mediated by technology can be applied in a wide array of classes apart from inviting teachers to self-evaluate their online practices. Furthermore, academic practitioners are given a useful classification of online learning taking into consideration the background, design, use and results of this methodology. Moreover, Salmon (2013, cited in Routledge Taylor & Francis Group) introduces the term e-tivities to make reference to those frameworks which foster and encourage virtual understanding and instruction among groups and individuals.

Even though the purpose of this book is to provide a guide for those academic professionals in education who want to become competent in designing and planning online lessons, there are some considerations that oppose this initial view and need to be highlighted. On the one hand, the authors resort to general cases to refer to issues that could have been exploited following specific and concrete examples for current classroom environments. This is the particular case of chapter four in which overgeneralizations are common and limit the author’s credibility. For example, “[...] a final, important component of the context dimension of online learning is the nature of the learners[...]” (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, n.d. p. 42). On the other hand, there are no concrete samples of currently used strategies or tools in learning online such as those related to social media, interactive webpages or specialized software which can facilitate the acquisition of approaches to be employed in education mediated through technology. The authors could have gone deeper into real life classroom environments in which online lessons are the basis of instruction at present.

This book highlights important topics within online education, as academic professionals in teaching and learning need to find opportunities to improve their classes. One of the barriers they encounter is the lack of experience in  sophisticated tools which, in certain occasions, prevent them from designing lessons that derive in active and collaborative students’ participation. However, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group (n.d.) do not adequately describe currently-used materials to plan classes through the use of technology due to the fact that they limit themselves to provide over general illustrations of a few cases which do not certainly address real classroom environments at present time.