Which teaching roles do you use?

I took another dive back into the early literature of online education, this week’s foray was led back to a look at computer conferencing and categorizations of instructor roles.

In his 1995 paper (I was 6 at the time), Dr. Zane Berge published his categorizations for instructor roles in computer conferencing environments. These roles are pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical (Berge, 1995). Computer conferencing would be a synchronous online session such as a Collaborate session, Skype meeting, or a Google Hangout.

So what do these roles mean? First let’s start by saying that an instructor doesn’t have to take on all of the roles, and some courses may have others stepping in to fill some of these roles as well. Steel Wagstaff, an instructional technology consultant at University of Wisconsin-Madison gave a pretty great summary of the roles in his Pressbook Teaching with Technology (Wagstaff, 2012).

An instructor takes on a social role when they’re building community inside of the class, either in the class as a whole such as encouraging students to introduce themselves, or by encouraging students to cluster together into groups. La Dawna Minnis and I went over some examples for building social presence in our webinar if you want to hear more on the topic. But those sorts of actions would fall into taking the social role in a class.

The technical (or technological role as I’ve seen elsewhere) is the technical training element, teaching students how to use a platform, technology, etc. This can also include explaining the rational for tools or the selection of tools provided.

The managerial role can cover a lot of the course housekeeping such as reminding students about deadlines, communicating or co-developing course expectations. But it also includes ensuring that students have the skills they need to participate in the course.

The last of the four roles is the pedagogical role. Instructors take on this role when they engage students as co-creators of curriculum, provide opportunities for students to personalize and contextualize their learning, or when they provide formative feedback. Instructors also take on the pedagogical role during the designing of the course when they deliberately design for the course’s instruction, engagement, and assessment.

Hopefully the outlining of these roles drives home the fact that these are fluid roles that instructors portray throughout the course and its development.

Libby Morris from the University of Georgia and Catherine Finnegan from the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents did some research into student and instructor behaviour in online learning environments and found that instructors in their second year online primarily took on the managerial role, while instructors who had been teaching online for three or more years would enact more roles during the course (Morris and Finnegan 2008–2009). So if you’re fresh to online teaching and finding that you’re spending most of your time in the managerial role it may just be a matter of getting used to the new media. If you want some help with some strategies for enacting more of these roles in your online course we here in the E-Learning Office are more than happy to help!

And if you’re wondering if there’s any pay off for all this role-swapping work Morris and Finnegan (2008–2009) also found that when instructors used more of these roles students were more active in discussions!

Receipts:

Berge, Z.L. (1995). Facilitating Computer Conferencing: Recommendations From the Field. Educational Technology. 35(1) 22–30

Morris, L. V., & Finnegan, C. L. (2008–2009), Best Practices in predicting and encouraging student persistence and achievement online. Journal of College Student Retention, 10, 55–64

Wagstaff, S. Teaching with technology. Retrieved from https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/teachingwithtech