What to Expect When Teaching Online

Abstract

This chapter sets out to discover how teachers view online teaching and what they experience when teaching online. It focuses on the stories that the 44 instructors shared with me during the interviews taken for this book. A brief perusal through the literature shows reports of increased time demands, more preparation and hard work, and a need for improved technical skills are just some of the issues that online education was reported to put upon teachers. Yet, as a result of this research, new issues were found, enhancing the knowledge on this subject of online teaching; for example, the extent of the adjustments made by teachers (discussed in greater detail in Chapter VII), the skill gap in technology among teachers and students (covered in Chapter V), and the tradeoffs faced by the teachers when moving to an online educational environment.