Five years with vocational teacher education online

Abstract

After running online Technical and Vocational Teacher Education (TVTE) classes for five years we have collated our experiences and thematically probed them through the following questions: (1) What are the pedagogical and didactic considerations with online TVTE (2) What are the technical challenges? (3) What opportunities and limitations have emerged? (4) How do the teachers and students experience online teaching? (5) How do teachers compare online teaching with on-campus teaching? Our experiences where accumulated through the TVTE in the Technological Programme (TP) at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), and are based on both teacher and student responses, learning logs, evaluations, and anonymised student data.
 In short, online study has helped us to achieve a larger geographical spread of students. The students experience online study as flexible, as they do not have to meet on campus every week. The technology has worked and allows for further development of the subjects being offered. It appears to be an equal opportunity offered compared to the campus-based with greater flexibility according to where the student is located. The workload also appears to be manageable for teachers who are engaged in the online class environment.