Preparing Virtual Classrooms and Becoming a Liberal Facilitator: The teacher in the 21st Century

Preparing Virtual Classrooms and Becoming a Liberal Facilitator: The teacher in the 21st Century

Computer technologies and advancements in education online are changing the learning landscape considerably year by year. According to The Guardian, by 2010 “all schools are expected to have a learning platform in place – that is, a virtual learning environment”, and it seems that every teacher in the business will need to adapt to this nationwide inclusion of digital networks, forums, wikis, and intranets. So how is teaching changing?
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nAs traditional schooling becomes more blended with online/e-Learning, education becomes more personalized and student driven as opposed to being geared towards a class age-group. In an essay written by Stephen Downes, ‘The Future of Online Learning’, he highlights that alongside “the development of education delivery technology,” which will teach as much as it manages learning for each student, he argues that “Learning Styles employed by online learning systems will be tailored to individual students as well.”
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nConsequently, it seems that teachers will less often be instructing a group in a traditional “repeat after me” sense, but will instead become a facilitator of learning, more akin to a professor at a university who oversees each individual thesis of his students. The increased use and dependence of technology in the classroom will mean students will have more option to learn through individual topics and specialities, and through the particular mediums that they respond to best. This could be a video lecture, or to complete a set piece of coursework which, of course, will then be marked by the teacher in the traditional sense.
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nTeaching in the future will therefore be as much of a learning experience for staff as for students. Again, according to Julie Nightingale in The Guardian, where schools have already been furnished with the most state of the art technologies, staff are rarely suitably learned to use them to their fullest potential. This, it seems, is because staff hardly get the opportunity to reflect on how new technologies can enhance their established teaching methodologies, but also because often very few staff are inducted per school at the outset
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nInterestingly this has led to courses in the subject of ‘Teaching in the Future’ springing up around the country. Nightingale use the example of the Interactive White Board as an example as to why teachers need to be taught sufficiently, but also need to be eager to invest in their time to make the most of it – so such advancements become “more than novelty presentation tools”.
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Posted Date: 2009-01-30 23:13:10