Online Teacher Education Course Redesign: From Stand-Alone Activities to Content Area Design Teams
Abstract: This paper discusses the redesign process of an online graduate secondary education course that was originally designed with stand-alone activities to one that is project-based. The design is such that the graduate students participate in the kinds of authentic activities that teachers are expected to do on a routine basis--design units of instruction and develop daily lesson plans to effectively facilitate student learning. Students are divided into content area design teams and use wiki technology as their design studios to collaboratively create an instructional unit and corresponding lesson plans that illustrate the various models of teaching. Additionally, members of the content area design teams fulfill primary weekly roles such as visual summary virtuoso, multimedia master, discussion facilitator, and lesson plan facilitator as they collaboratively create learning artifacts within the wiki environment.