Barbour, M. K., & Hodges, C. B. (2023, June 19). Digital teacher education for a better future: Recommendations for teacher preparation for an online environment [Paper]. Annual Meeting of the European Distance Education Network, Dublin, Ireland.

1. Digital Teacher Education for a
Better Future: Recommendations
for Teacher Preparation for an
Online Environment
Michael K. Barbour
Touro University California
Charles B. Hodges
Georgia Southern University

4. https://k12sotn.ca

5. Online learning requires purposeful instructional
planning, using a systematic model of administrative
procedures, and course development. It also requires
the careful consideration of various pedagogical
strategies. These pedagogical considerations are used
to determine which are best suited to the specific
affordances and challenges of delivery mediums and
the purposeful selection of tools based on the
strengths and limitations of each one. Finally, careful
planning requires that teachers be appropriately
trained to be able to support the tools that are being
used, and for teachers to be able to effectively use
those tools to help facilitate student learning.

6. Online learning requires purposeful instructional
planning, using a systematic model of administrative
procedures, and course development. It also requires
the careful consideration of various pedagogical
strategies. These pedagogical considerations are used
to determine which are best suited to the specific
affordances and challenges of delivery mediums and
the purposeful selection of tools based on the
strengths and limitations of each one. Finally, careful
planning requires that teachers be appropriately
trained to be able to support the tools that are being
used, and for teachers to be able to effectively use
those tools to help facilitate student learning.

7. Emergency remote teaching is a temporary shift of
instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due
to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of fully
remote teaching solutions for instruction or education
that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as
blended or hybrid courses and that will return to that
format once the crisis or emergency has abated. The
primary objective in these circumstances is not to re-
create a robust educational ecosystem but rather to
provide temporary access to instruction and
instructional supports in a manner that is quick to set
up and is reliably available during an emergency or
crisis.

8. Emergency remote teaching is a temporary shift of
instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode
due to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of
fully remote teaching solutions for instruction or
education that would otherwise be delivered face-
to-face or as blended or hybrid courses and that will
return to that format once the crisis or emergency
has abated. The primary objective in these
circumstances is not to re-create a robust
educational ecosystem but rather to provide
temporary access to instruction and instructional
supports in a manner that is quick to set up and is
reliably available during an emergency or crisis.

15. • McCracken (2020) described how during the Spanish flu
pandemic the telephone – a technology only 40 years old at
the time – was being used for high school students in Long
Beach. According to the author, “the fact that California
students were using it as an educational device was so novel
that it made the papers.” (para. 2)
• during the polio epidemic in New Zealand in 1948, which
closed all of that country’s schools, and the Correspondence
School – now Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu – used traditional
correspondence education to send lessons to every
household, as well as using educational radio to broadcast
lessons during the first semester of the school year (Te Kura,
2018)

16. • distance/online learning has regularly been suggested
as an option to maintain instructional time during
short term school closures (Haugen, 2015; Hua et al.,
2017; Milman, 2014; Morones, 2014; Swetlik et al.,
2015)
• “the immediate post-earthquake challenges of
redesigning courses using different blends of face-to-
face and online activities to meet the needs of on-
campus, regional campus, and distance pre-service
teacher education students” (Mackey et al., 2012, p.
122)

17. • online learning helped facilitate continued access to instruction in 2003 in
Hong Kong when schools had to close due to the SARS outbreak (Alpert,
2011)
• during the H1N1 outbreak in 2008 remote teaching allowed approximately
560,000 students in Hong Kong to continue learning during that pandemic
induced school closure (Latchem & Jung, 2009)
• following high levels of absenteeism during the H1N1 pandemic, private
schools in Boliva developed their own virtual classrooms and trained
teachers on how to teach in that environment (Barbour et al., 2011)
• “in Singapore online and blended learning was so pervasive that teaching in
online and virtual environments was a required course in their teacher
education programs and schools are annually closed for week-long periods
to prepare the K-12 system for pandemic or natural disaster forced
closures” (Barbour, 2010, p. 310)

22. Recommendations for Teacher
Preparation
Hodges, Barbour, and Ferdig (2022) provide six
objectives with the aim that all teacher
education programs will prepare teacher
candidates with the knowledge, skills, and
experience necessary to be successful teaching
in online and blended modalities.
Hodges, Barbour, Ferdig (2022)
Open Access

23. Objective 1
• There must be sufficient course work to give
pre-service teachers access to knowledge,
skills, and attitudes related to K-12 online and
blended learning
• The word sufficient is used purposely to allow
flexibility in the number of courses, but the aim is
program wide and program deep (Schmidt-Crawford
et al., 2020) opportunities to prepare pre-service
teachers with the required skills and knowledge

24. Objective 2
• Teacher candidates should have experiences
as online learners.
• The authentic experience of them being online
learners themselves will help them gain empathy
for their future students and the problems or
opportunities those students experience.

25. Objective 3
• TEP must include field experiences in OBL
• Some pedagogical skills from a standard teacher education
programs still apply, many of the necessary online teaching
competencies are completely new to even recently licensed
teachers (An et al., 2021; Da- vis & Roblyer, 2005).
• A challenge here is overcoming perceptions that online
teaching is not real teaching. (See Kennedy and Archambault
(2012a)). Also, (Archambault et al., 2016) found that the belief
that teacher education should offer online field experiences
has decreased.

26. Objective 4
• Metrics and instruments must be created or
refined to further assess and support growth
of PSTs knowledge, skills, and attitudes of
teaching in K-12 OBL
• Use existing research on characteristics of quality online and
blended instructors to create metrics and instruments to
measure knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards OBL
instruction.
• The goal is to determine if and how a preservice teacher
might be prepared to teach in such modalities prior to placing
them in such con- texts.

27. Objective 5
• Validated, research-based standards must be
developed
• A lack of validated instruments has hindered the development
of research-based standards (Barbour, 2020)
• There are many sets of standards, but they were not
developed using an accepted systematic research process
(Barbour, 2020), and efforts to validate them using research
after the fact have been flawed or have found the standards
to be lacking (Adelstein & Barbour, 2018).

28. Objective 6
• Have accrediting bodies and state agencies
require that all PSTs have meaningful and
useful preparation to deliver OBL.
• National accreditation bodies or state teacher
preparation agencies need to require teacher education
programs to ensure that all PSTs have meaningful and
useful preparation to deliver OBL.
• If the first five objectives are achieved, the essential
elements will be in place for accrediting agencies to make
the requirement.

30. Your
Questions
and
Comments

31. Associate Professor of Instructional Design
College of Education & Health Services
Touro University California
mkbarbour@gmail.com
http://www.michaelbarbour.com