Session 6

Title: Impact of place and culture in an online environment: Lessons from an international, collaborative teacher education project

Session Description:

This presentation reports on an internationally-collaborative teacher education project between the Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University and the School of Education, University of Iceland. In the Winter semester 2008, the presenters combined their respective classes, distributed across Canada, Iceland and elsewhere, to team-teach in a fully-online, collaborative environment. The common goals of this project were to expand the horizons of the students (and their instructors), to investigate to what extent 2.0 technologies currently available could facilitate the creation of a collaborative community across these distances, cultures and diverse expectations, and to provide these student-teachers with a real-life experience of the advantages and constraints of teaching and learning in this widely-distributed, online environment.

For the Athabasca cohort, this was their first compulsory distance education course at the Masters level, while the Icelandic course had been originally designed and team–taught as an elective with Bemidji State University in Minnesota 2001-6. The collaboration worked at two levels: instructor and student. The student collaboration operated in three main stages: 1. introductions, 2. a major collaborative task, and 3. debriefing as part of a question and answer session with a expert in online communities. For the instructors, several electronic meetings were necessary to: analyze the respective course structures, find appropriate techniques for making links, decide on the means of student collaboration; and discuss student perceptions and workload implications. Tools used included Moodle as the learning management system (LMS), together with discussion forums and wikis, Skype™, and Elluminate Live™. Data was collected from student postings and responses, student questions and comments in the debriefing session, and student evaluations at the end of the course. Results from this data will be presented, together with some guidelines, suggestions and cautions about how to organize and run such an online collaborative teaching and learning experience.

Presenter: Dr Debra Hoven, Dr Solveig Jakobsdottir

Dr Hoven teaches distance education and technology for online learning at the Masters and Doctoral levels in the Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University. Her research interests include innovative integration of technology into teacher education and applied linguistics, intercultural perspectives on changing pedagogies, instructional design, multimedia technology, computer mediated communications and social networking software, and learner individual differences. http://cde.athabascau.ca/faculty/debrah.php

Before July 2008 the University of Iceland – School of Education was an independent university – Iceland University of Education.
Due to changed circumstances, e.g., changes in semester the course was taught in Iceland the team-teaching of the course discontinued.


Dr Jakobsdottir is an Associate Professor in the School of Education, University of Iceland. Her research and teaching ranges across distance education and applications of information and communication technology (ICT), educational technology and multimedia in education. Her publications are in the area of distance, blended and online education and teaching, ICT in teaching and learning at the upper-secondary, post-secondary and adult levels, and the advantages and constraints of such ICT use. http://soljak.khi.is/cv-english.htm