E-teachers at work: Exploring a process for reviewing e-teaching for ongoing professional learning

The effective teacher is a reflective teacher who seeks to learn from a range of sources (literature, formal theory, evidence) in order to continually improve student learning. This project seeks to capture the impact on practice inherent in the collegial development of a theoretically informed framework which enables lecturers to monitor and analyse what they do to create an effective online teacher presence and thereby facilitate a productive online learning environment for their students. Initially, the project involves a pilot group of tertiary e-teachers interacting with the seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education (Chickering and Gamson, 1987) to develop a framework to monitor and analyse online interactions for evidence of their teacher presence. Secondly, lecturers will be invited to submit an electronic portfolio which contains samples of online interaction which are evidence of their teacher presence online. Thirdly, working with an experienced online lecturer as a mentor, lecturers can develop a process which helps them analyse and review this data to identify both strengths and areas for further professional learning. Finally, through a reflective process lecturers will identify factors which contribute to effective online teacher presence. This is a work-in-progress report on this research project which received the 2006 ASCILITE research grant. This concise paper outlines the research proposal, rationale and methodology, and gives an update on progress with the project.