Academic teaching is something that I really appreciate doing and also something that I believe needs to further discussed. With my background as an upper secondary teacher I have always been interested in educational and pedagogical questions. I was privileged to have good colleges, who remained curious and eager to develop their own practice, throughout their active carriers. My own didactical interest started to evolve in that environment and eventually brought me back to the University as an PhD-student, within physics education research. When I thereafter started working at the University I meet many persons who were interested in educational questions, while some colleges seemed to look upon teaching more as an obligation, to be able to continue with their own research. From my perspective it seems like the University in general values an employee’s subject content knowledge more than his or hers pedagogical teaching skills. I firmly believe that we, as teachers and researchers, need to possess and value both these qualities equally high. Academic teaching is without a doubt an important undertaking that constantly needs to be evaluated and questioned, in order to adapt to the increasingly rapid development of our digital society. This places high demands on us as teachers, in the sense that we both have to develop our own digital competences, as well as considering how to implement and adapt our teaching accordingly.
Krumsvik (2014) has written an article about teacher educators´ digital competence, where he argues that information and communication technology has to be clearly highlighted in the teacher training curriculum to bridge the gap between actual school setting and teacher education. This is especially evident in our own courses for teacher students, where they themselves in their forthcoming profession, are expected to possess and teach digital competences to their own pupils. I agree with Krumsvik when he emphasises that digitial competence earlier has been a missing link within teacher education. This course is therefore especially important from my perspective.
I would still like to believe that I have a rather good overview of the different digital resources, that are available to us here at the University. I teach both campus and distance students, by using different kinds of video meeting tools. In my role as course coordinator I design courses accordingly to the digital platform Canvas. My challenge is to find new ways, how to effectively use these different digital tools to help students’ progress with their own learning. Right now, I mostly use these digital resources to transfer information back and forth between me and my students. I struggle to achieve a higher degree of blended learning with the help of digital technology, as expressed by Mozelius and Hettiarachchi (2017). One way could be to include quizzes, similar to the once that were presented during our last meeting, combined with the use of a flipped classroom technique. I think this was interesting and I am going to try and implement it into my coming courses. I would also like to further explore how writing blogs can be used in courses to better follow individual student’s progression. So, based on the ten categories presented by Mozelius and Hettiarachchi (2017), I am especially interested in the didactical category, and in eager to further study how blended learning can be used to enhance the pedagogical effectiveness. Categories such as course outcomes, course design and collaboration, are also factors that are of interest and fits within the scope of didactics.
Reference
Krumsvik R., J. (2014) Teacher educators’ digital competence, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 58(3), p. 269-280.