How Are Our Roles as Online Educators Evolving?

You may come to this course with a lot of online teaching experience, or none at all. For those of you who have been at this awhile, you may remember the early days of distributed (or distance) education which followed the correspondence course model; material was mailed to the student, students accessed the material, and then demonstrated how successfully they had absorbed it by completing tests or producing written assignments. (This model actually goes back to mid-1800's Links to an external site.). Later, tools such as books and lectures were delivered via educational TV or videos. These can be thought of as broadcast media; materials were packaged in a format so that learners could sit back and absorb the information (or not).

But now we have moved beyond these models. Today students have the ability to collaboratively build and share knowledge online. Online and hybrid courses at Seattle University are not set up just as electronic repositories for course materials. Rather, your course is a space for learning materials that have been thoughtfully curated and, most importantly, your course is a space of inquiry designed around the deep questions of your discipline, questions that challenge students to construct knowledge and meaning in a participatory way.