Avondale-led research paper wins journal’s Best Article Award
A paper by Avondale academics and their colleagues identifying essential thresholds for tertiary educators new to online teaching has won a journal’s Best Article Award.
The paper, “Threshold concepts about online pedagogy for novice online teachers,” appeared in the final issue of Higher Education Research & Development this past year. It describes the process of distilling a collection of concepts identified by educators from three tertiary institutions who were teaching online. The educators answered a questionnaire and wrote reflective journal entries. An analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data identified the concepts and the evidence for claims about them.
The essential 12 concepts are grouped in three thematic clusters—preparation and course design, online presence and interaction and relationships. They note, for example, that: preparation for designing and planning online teaching may take longer than for on-campus teaching; students can learn without the teacher being present, and; synchronous communication methods in online learning contexts have learning benefits.
Associate Professor Peter Kilgour and professorial colleagues Daniel Reynaud and Maria Northcote, along with Associate Professor Catherine McLoughlin from Australian Catholic University and Dr Kevin Gosselin from HonorHealth Research Institute, receive $1000 between them for winning the award.
Though most empirical studies using threshold concepts focus on student learning, Kilgour’s—funded by a grant from the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching—focused on online pedagogy for teachers and confirmed it presents “significant challenges” to those experiencing it for the first time. The need to “engage deeply with technology and pedagogy” may “involve entering a state of liminality, or ‘stuckness’, frequently associated with uncertainty and anxiety,” reads the paper. “Once through the state of liminality, there is scope for pedagogical transformation for the academic as an online educator.”
This understanding of the learning journey for online teachers can “inform the content of professional development activities and the design of supporting resources.” The bottom line, says Kilgour, Director of the Christian Education Research Centre: “Educators have to realise that teaching online is not the same as teaching on campus. You can’t just replicate.”
The award acknowledges what a panel selected by the executive of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia considers the best article published in the journal each year. The panel is guided by criteria that seeks succinct, coherent and engaging papers with new analytical or critical insight, methodological soundness and a persuasive and well-supported conclusion.
Kilgour says the mass move to online teaching and learning because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic may have helped influence the panel. “Suddenly, online teaching became very important and this became a popular paper.”
And one that makes Associate Dean (Research) Associate Professor Carolyn Rickett proud. “These research leaders whose work is recognised nationally and internationally are making key contributions to new knowledge and practice.”
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