Abstract
The instructor is an integral member of the educational environment through leading, facilitating, and supporting the development of a learning community. This is integrally important within an elearning environment, wherein motivational engagement is a potentially more nuanced environment due to the differentiation in time, space, and place. The instructor's philosophical belief systems highlight the potential for transformative social learning environments that directly impact the instructional design of the course, differentiating enhancements towards supporting user experience, as well as highlighting the potential for transformative impacts within learning environments as well as the holistic learning community. Advancing an enhanced understanding around the instructor's philosophical beliefs around the teaching and learning process strengthens not only the efforts of the instructor towards critical pedagogical understandings, but also the larger learning environment that includes the impact of the virtual world upon the digital connections that undergird communities of learning.
TopIntroduction
An initial recognition of the importance and impact of the instructor upon the elearning environment supports delving into the additional elearning considerations around the instructor’s philosophical belief systems, with special attention towards the potential for transformative impacts within the social learning realm. Through a recognition of the experience and expertise of three strongly viable contributors supports a recognition of not only three-quarters of a century of learned knowledge and understanding, but the intriguing curiosity around the addition of a technology-centric discussion adds more fully to the discussion. Suggesting that higher education faculty within the teacher education and leadership offer viable opportunities to critically analyze pedagogical understandings is a more normal consideration within the teaching and learning realm, due to the nature of critical pedagogy and professional engagement within a critically analytic understanding of the “why” behind teaching, learning and curricular support that includes instructional design efforts within digital realms. What is not a regular occurrence, is the opportunity for higher education faculty to critically analyze their understandings within the teaching and learning realms so as to better understand one’s own philosophical beliefs as associated with the teaching and learning process. Advancing the discussion around instructor’s philosophical belief systems associated with transformative social learning environments, specifically embedded within elearning engagement, while enhancing the discussion is important and deeply impactful.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Microlearning: The chunking of information into short-term, specific snippets of focused information is meant to result in lessening the cognitive load concerns of learners, towards successfully attaining new information or skills quickly.
Soft Skills: These are personality styles of communication and engagement with other people. How does one communicate effectively, how does one present herself in team, group, and individual communication efforts, all falls within one’s professional soft skills that may also be labeled as dispositions.
Learning Theories: Reflective practitioners watched the different ways that learners engaged with new information, researching the different viewed ways that the learner specifically understood and repeated or understood this new information. The attempt was to better understand how new information is learned and the extent to which the new skill or information will be repeated and successfully used.
Instructional Outcome: The outcome of a learning opportunity, whether within the educational metaphoric walls of a classroom environment, in a professional landscape, or within the modeling and mentorship efforts of the real world. The outcome is the level of success attained, towards reaching an instructional goal or instructional objective.
Learning Community: A group of people who come together to focus upon attaining information. This group may maintain their assembled status or disburse after the outcome is achieved.
Disposition: This term is reflective of professional actions and expectations associated with the professional engagement within the work world.
Philosophical Perceptions: The underlying beliefs of a person are developed over time, no matter whether familial, cultural, societal, academic, or other ways through which morays and differences in understanding are embedded within a person’s understanding of the world. Within this discussion, the focus is upon instructional philosophical beliefs, that reflect an understanding around the teaching and learning understandings associated with beliefs that turn into decisions focused upon designing courses, choices in instructional engagement with learners, beliefs around how other people learn, as well as how to teach the specific subject matter ( Crawford, 2016 ).
Engagement: This experience is when someone is fully focused upon the task under way. This may be a learning opportunity, a research effort, a creative opportunity, or any effort within which a person is fully embedded.
Subject Matter Expertise: This is an area of constant study, no matter whether formalized or informal study, wherein the person has enough working knowledge of the information within a field so as to be considered knowledgeable and useful towards sharing that information towards successful outcomes.