Abstract:

Asynchronous online courses generally provide little opportunity for students to collaborate with peers. In a typical asynchronous course, students work fairly independently and the main interaction with peers is in discussion forums. Yet, professional standards for teachers and school leaders recognize collaborating with stakeholders as a significant responsibility (InTASC, 2013; Professional Standards for Education Leaders, 2015). Acknowledging this, we wanted to provide candidates with an authentic experience communicating and working in teams, and simultaneously make their online coursework more interactive. This paper and presentation will focus on how faculty in an asynchronous online education program addressed this problem of practice. It will also describe the steps taken to identify and redesign assignments that could become collaborative projects in place of independent student work. The results of several semesters of feedback from students who were required to work in collaborative teams to complete assignments will be presented.

Keywords:

Online Learning, Asynchronous, Collaboration, Educator Preparation, Online Pedagogy, Peer-Peer Interaction.