Student Perceptions of Transactional Distance in Online Teacher Education Courses
Abstract: As teacher education shifts to online delivery, the need grows for teacher education course designers and instructors to better understand how teaching and learning vary with delivery system. One frame for understanding the online milieu from instructional and design perspectives is the theoretical base for distance education. Transactional distance depends upon the instructor’s design of the course (structure), the instructor’s communication of expectations to the learner (dialogue), and the learner’s ability to enhance his/her own learning experience (autonomy) (Moore 2007). This paper relates this theoretical base to the practical aspects of designing and teaching online courses in teacher education, reviews instruments for assessment of online courses, and describes an analysis of the design components in online teacher education courses. This study focuses on the assessment of transactional distance in an online teacher education course and the contributions of the course’s design elements to the students’ perceptions of transactional distance.
Presider: Jintavee (Monsakul) Khlaisang, Chulalongkorn University