Abstract:

The Covid-19 crisis has forced swift adaptations in education worldwide, prominent among which has been the growth of online education. The challenge of this has not simply been in terms of delivery mechanisms for universities and teacher educators. It has also raised awareness of the need to prepare student teachers to work in complex settings and across many media. Online teaching is clearly not just face to face teaching delivered at a distance, but has brought with it the need for a sometimes profound shift in thinking about the purposes and nature of education.

In China, universities transferred teacher training exclusively to online teaching and mandated that teacher educators should acquaint student teachers with online learning and teaching as tools for use in their future careers as school teachers. In this context, the move to an online learning approach which emphasized collaboration between students, where it was not previously a major aspect of face to face teaching, may be having a significant impact on students. Online learning almost inevitably involves collaborative learning and it has been suggested that the move towards this may, in particular, have a lasting effect on teachers and students throughout the current decade. Little is known, however, about student teachers’ views of online collaborative learning (OCL), in terms of its effectiveness as an approach and of the longer lasting impact it may have upon student teachers’ views about teaching and learning.

In this qualitative study, we examined the views of 18 student teachers following their first experiences of OCL and explored the impact on them as learners and as future teachers. Experience of OCL had clearly impacted student teachers’ views about their own learning, as well as developing their collaborative skills. It appeared also to have produced positive intentions to use OCL in future. These student teachers saw the experience of OCL as a vital part of their professional development, while recognizing the challenges it raised for them as future school teachers. This example from China identifies ways in which OCL can empower teachers and suggests that OCL can be a valuable teaching experience to shape trainee teachers’ identities as learners and teachers.

Keywords:

Student teachers, Covid-19, online collaborative learning, teacher education, China.