Students’ Experiences of Navigating Online Teaching Practice Modules

Abstract

Globally, more and more institutions are moving to offer Comprehensive Open Distance e-Learning (CODeL) opportunities for distance education (DE) students. With this move to an online mode of teaching and learning, the focus has also shifted from a teacher-centred DE pedagogy to a student-centred ODeL pedagogy, with a strong focus on student success through improved student support to promote SDG4 (quality education for all). With an aim to improve the support offered to ODeL students in a South African context, the authors of this article set out to investigate student teacher experiences of teaching practice modules in an ODeL environment. This qualitative case study investigated the experiences of 30 student teachers studying teacher education at an ODeL institution. The module evaluation forms of students from two teaching practice modules were used to collect data. While literature revealed a need for improved student support in an ODeL context, research is limited on the support needs of student teachers in their ODeL teaching practice modules, which necessitated this research. The findings of this study revealed students struggled with online placement for their teaching practice, had varied experiences with online communication within the module, and had an overall positive experience with ODeL learning. We recommend that online tools be upgraded to make it easier for students to use and that there needs to be a diverse system of communication to meet the needs of all students. We believe that fully online teaching practice systems will open up future research activities