6.1 Evaluation of an online technology leadership master's program  (Page 5/16)

DePietro, Ferdig, Black, and Preston (2008) acknowledged that there was not a lot of information about best practices for teaching in K-12 online settings. The principles that were identified were similar to face-to-face instruction. Several organizations published documents for teaching online courses. Although these documents addressed course design, they failed to address the skill set required to teach online. The skills needed for providing students with quality online learning experiences included coordination with pedagogy, technology and content expertise (Kurtz, Beaudoin,&Sagee, 2004; Olson&Wisher, 2002; Russell, 2004; Savery, 2005). The skills necessary to successfully teach online often were beyond those required in a traditional classroom.

Many online program professional development requirements focused on helping teachers understand how to motivate individual learners, enhance student interaction and understanding without visual cues, tailor instruction to particular learning styles, and develop or modify interactive lessons to meet student needs. Dawley, Rice, and Hicks (2010) reported that the United States was falling behind other countries in providing preservice training for online teaching. DePietro et al. (2008) suggested that with valid and reliable feedback regarding best practices, a framework for an online education certification was needed to promote a consistent model for exemplary instruction in K-12 online teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 tools

The web was shaped by Web 2.0 into communities across the globe that enabled anyone to join and allowed unlimited participation (Parker&Chao, 2007; Tapscott&Williams, 2008). The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2009) reported the technological environment within which modern education operated was becoming increasingly complex; offering new possibilities, but also giving rise to challenges. Furthermore, a continual evolution of technologies and how they were used since the introduction of the Internet was indicated. Web 2.0 tools, virtual worlds, simulations, and mobile technologies continued this trend of co‐evolution. An understanding was beginning to develop of how the trajectory of this co‐evolution would occur. Additionally, data indicated that more than one-fifth of US higher education students were actively contributing content to blogs, wikis, photo or video websites and 18% contributed regularly to at least three of these (OECD, 2009).

According to Mills (2007), this relatively new paradigm, Web 2.0, enabled web-based applications that routinely provided communication, contribution, and communication capabilities. These social networking sites, blogs, wikis and other media and interactive web conferencing sites enabled users to create and share information. Moreover, in order to properly discuss Web 2.0 tools and how they had altered the learning landscape, it was helpful to understand the role of Web 1.0. Hastings, CEO of Netflix, described Web 1.0 as dial-up with approximately 50K average bandwidth. Web 2.0 averaged 1 megabit of bandwidth, while he predicted that Web 3.0 would be 10 megabits of bandwidth, which would be the full video web, and that would feel like Web 3.0 (Web 1.0, 2008). Flew (2008) identified the differences in Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 as a move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging (folksonomy) (Web 1.0, 2008). O’Reily (2005) coined the term Web 2.0 at the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004. He described Web 2.0 as a business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.