Photo by Steve Wheeler

I have just published a third module in my series on digital learning for the ZilLearn platform. This course, as with the others, is completely free to take – and is especially written with teachers in mind.

It’s called Supporting Online Learners and the link is here. If you’re new to online teaching, or are revisiting it, do consider spending an hour of your time to browse through the ideas in this module.

I cover a range of themes around online learning support, and apply several well known theories to explain what is required in digital learning environments. These include an explanation and application of Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice, Bruner’s Instructional Scaffolding, Moore and Kearsley’s Four Types of Interaction model, Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, and Moore’s Transactional Distance Theory, among others. I also offer advice from several years experience in supporting online learners from undergraduate and post-graduate programmes. There is a quiz and a range of activities. The module is not intended as a set of guidelines, or prescriptive ‘this is how you do it’ instructions, but rather is a collection of ideas and theories that teachers might find useful if they are entering into the world of online teaching, possibly for the first time.

Other available modules in the series:
Digital Literacies
Personal Learning Environments

As ever, I’m open for feedback about the module – and you are invited to post your thoughts below in the comments box on this blog. Keep safe, keep well and stay at home!

Supporting Online Learners by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.