Tracing Online Lecturer Orchestration of Multiple Roles and Scaffolds over Time

Introduction

Online learning has gained increasing recognition worldwide as an alternative to conventional forms of education. The development of classes as learning communities is commonly advocated as a productive way to support learning in online environments (Aceto, Dondi, & Marzotto, 2010). This development however relies on students coming to a sense of shared responsibility for and expertise in collaborative knowledge building. This in turn, relies on teachers re-imagining their practice and course design. Teacher recognition of the need to adapt pedagogy supports the notion that the teacher or lecturer’s role in any teaching-learning environment be it in a face-to-face or online setting is of key importance (Forret, Khoo, & Cowie, 2005). In this chapter, we focus on time and the temporal aspects of the affordances and constraints of the online environment. Specifically, we illustrate how time, once its social and subjective dimension is recognised, can be leveraged as a resource in online learning community development. We provide an analytical account of the experiences of a lecturer and his students in a fully online Research Methods Masters level graduate course in a tertiary institution in New Zealand. Although very experienced in teaching the course in face-to-face contexts, the lecturer (Adrian) was a novice with regards to teaching online. The study involved Adrian’s first time of being responsible for an online course. Over the period of the course, the lecturer came to realise how he could take advantage of the affordances and ameliorate the temporal constraints on interaction, that are part of campus-based courses, within an online setting. Online learning environments afford different configurations and conceptions of lecturer roles and scaffolding actions through the different ways time, space and temporality can be leveraged in support of learning.

We begin the chapter with an overview of the theoretical framework- a sociocultural view of learning - which underpins our research. Part of this theorising incorporates the notion of online learning community development as a productive way forward in online pedagogy. Details of our case study illustrating how the novice online lecturer gained increasing understanding of productive teaching practices by leveraging temporal issues in the online teaching context are provided next. This was accomplished through the orchestration of multiple roles to scaffold student learning as part of developing a class learning community. The chapter concludes with the implications of the findings for educators and researchers.