Summary

Rita is now starting to fit some pieces of her online learning puzzle together. She can see how her existing knowledge of education theories fits with what she hopes to achieve online.

Rita’s university already has a Learning Management System, so she can prepare to use that to host the teaching materials she will use to support her online lessons. She will reuse the PowerPoints she already uses in the classroom, and she will still point her students to key resources on the internet, but she is aware that she will need to change some of the structure of the materials if she is going to use the ‘flipped’ approach. Some of the tasks that students currently do after class, they would do before class in the online course, and so a little extra guidance might be necessary.

Rita is starting to conceptualise some of her lessons as ‘learning objects’ that students can interact with away from her presence (either in the classroom or online). She is realising that if she can create some learning materials that ‘stand alone’ online, she can spend more of her time answering students’ questions and helping those that are struggling to understand. Her synchronous lessons will then become more like ‘workshops’ helping students to understand the subjects, rather than ‘teaching’ them in the traditional way (the ‘teaching’ would be partially achieved by the learning objects that the students access before the online classes).

Now that Rita has some very specific ideas for what she wants to achieve, she must discover which technologies she might be able to use to make this happen. And that is what we shall examine next.