ABSTRACT
This qualitative research involved the development of 12 weeks of twice-weekly virtual maker professional learning (PL) sessions for K-12 and post-secondary educators at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The sessions were developed by four researchers from a maker lab in Ontario, Canada that moved entirely online in March 2020. The research question driving the study was: what are best practices related to virtual maker professional learning? Findings and implications related to this question include: a) technical issues should be anticipated and addressed in advance of each session;b) simple, hands-on activities are most effective for online maker professional learning;c) collaboration are pivotal to a rich online maker professional learning experience;d) using free, virtual tools is imperative for equitable access and learning;and e) adaptability is key when working with a diversity of learners/teachers from varied subjects and divisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic not only impacted people's lives globally, but also pushed faculty to quickly adapt to an online teaching environment and continue it until the end of the school or academic year. This study is urgently needed to gain an understanding of the challenges STEM faculty members face during the COVID-19 era as they make the transition to teaching online, while many of them engage in this shift for the first time. The initial results of an online survey of 101 International STEM faculty members showed that online evaluation and pedagogy are the most disrupted dimensions of e-learning when instructors struggled to re-orchestrate their teaching during such an unprecedented event. In addition, while the affective domain of teaching is identified as the missing dimension of an e-learning framework, adoption of the new technology is rated as the area of least concern for teaching STEM online.