ABSTRACT
Integration of computational thinking and programming into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes is needed to promote students' learning of twenty-first century skills. Yet, teachers are not equipped to achieve this integration successfully as teacher education curricula do not generally align with this need. With the Covid-19 outbreak, curricula also need to be adapted for online environments. This qualitative study presents the redesign of an educational technology course that introduces programming and computational thinking to STEM preservice teachers for online settings, and explores learning experiences of preservice teachers, in terms of how they combine technological knowledge with pedagogy and content. Data were collected from course artifacts, such as reading responses, coding challenges, and lesson designs and implementations. The findings showed the online course design was helpful in enhancing preservice STEM teachers' pedagogical approaches of how to teach computational thinking and programming. Offering hands-on coding practices in the course allowed preservice teachers to improve their technological knowledge (programming), and they were able to integrate their technological pedagogical knowledge into their content area and design meaningful lessons. The study offers implications for design of online teacher education courses that promote preservice teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge for computational thinking and programming.Implications for practice or policy:* The online course design implemented in this study can be adjusted into different contexts, considering that fully-online or blended teacher education courses will still be needed in the future.* The design guidelines used in this study can be utilised to develop online teacher education modules for educational technology topics other than programming.* The question prompts given to preservice teachers in the study can be refined to trigger deeper reflection on pedagogy of computing education.
ABSTRACT
This mixed-method study was conducted to validate the factor structure of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework in the COVID-19 semester (Spring 2020). Spring 2020 is typically characterized as an emergency remote teaching (ERT) period, distinguished from purposefully-designed instruction for online teaching. To examine the CoI framework's usefulness for understanding university students' online learning experiences in this period, the authors collected data using the CoI survey and interviews. The structural equation modeling analyses indicated that teaching presence predicted social and cognitive presences more significantly in the ERT period than regular times. The qualitative findings showed that the courses where teaching presence was high were evaluated as effective by participants even when cognitive and social presences in these courses were relatively low. These findings suggested that course instructors should prioritize planning well-designed online course activities to ensure their teaching presence in times of emergency