The Discourse of Pre-service Teachers on Designing an Online Learning Course

Abstract

This study aims to understand the collaborative discourse of the preservice teachers on their customly designed online learning course. The participants were 38 pre-service teachers from a teacher education program in Taiwan. Using a design-oriented instructional approach, two iteration of design thinking activities were scaffolded to help the participants work on their online course projects. To this end, the participants discussed how to design their online course/project in a knowledge building environment in which they were encouraged to generate and optimize their design ideas. Data mainly came from online discussion through posted notes. The findings indicate that although the number of posts is few, the design ideas in these posts showed some quality improvement. At the end of the course, it was also found that all groups were able to design interesting learning contents and activities personalized for their target students’ online learning use for addressing some real-life problems.