There is a ton of free material on learning how to teach with new digital tools online. That’s one of the best things that ProfHacker writers have been dispensing since its inception. We’ve written about teaching with Twitter, with Wikipedia, creating interactive texts with Twine, even the Creepy Treehouse problem of friending your students on social media. One of the things we haven’t done, though, is offer online courses on digital pedagogy--a new venture the journal Hybrid Pedagogy has taken with Digital Pedagogy Lab!
Digital Pedagogy Lab has just released a wonderful suite of offerings to train and build community around pedagogy. One that’s just started is The Flipped Classroom, taught by Kris Schaffer (@krisshaffer), which explores the “diversity of practices that are typically associated with the inverted/flipped classroom,” both practically and theoretically. Upcoming in Fall are two more really useful courses: Teaching with Twitter, taught by Jesse Stommel (@jessifer), and Learning Online, by both Jesse and Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher). The course descriptions for both are tantalizing. The Teaching with Twitter course description declares: “Pedagogy is not reducible to 140 characters. Pedagogy is, in fact, not reducible. However, it can (and does) happen in spaces as small as 140 characters.” Similarly, the Learning Online course description exhorts: “In this course, we’ll explore the shape of the room we find ourselves in when we learn and teach online.”
What I greatly appreciate about the Digital Pedagogy Lab courses is that they have provided adjunct and student rates for all the classes. They are also short--each of them only lasts about three intense weeks, which for me is the perfect way to learn: build up a momentum quickly and ride through it before it dies out. Early bird specials are still ongoing for the Fall courses, so if they intrigue you, make sure you sign up before they go away.
Have you ever taken any online classes on pedagogy? Share with us your experience in the comments.
