Week 2 Readings and Resources

Teaching Adults Online

The readings this week are grouped into 3 clusters:

1. Teaching Perspectives/Learning Styles
2. Online and Adult Learning
3. Learning Theories (general overview and reference)

We want you to think about how you teach and why? What values and assumptions and experiences do you bring to the experience of teaching online? We've provided a link to one instrument that might help you reflect and some readings about teaching perspectives around online learning.

We want you to reflect on what you know about the way adults learn and then, to consider how adults learn online. Much of the research on adult learning principles is derived from face-to-face education in traditional settings. We ask you to broaden your consideration of learner diversity and the potential affordances of our increasingly networked world with the easy access to powerful technological tools for learning.

We want you to reflect on what you know about learning theories so we've provided resources that offer an overview (or, a reminder) of these schools of thought. Remember that most well-known theories are derived from face-to-face learning environments and, the older theories didn't take into account some of the things we've learned about how adults learn differently than youth or children.