University introduces online education mentoring project

University introduces online education mentoring project

Researchers from Purdue University at Calumet have recently announced the launch of a distance education mentoring project that will help professors transition their instruction methods to the world of online education, according to InsideHigherEd.com.

The project takes faculty who are preparing to adapt their curriculum to the online environment and pairs them with web-savvy colleagues who mentor the instructors on best practices for online course development.

Chair on instructional technology Janet Buckenmeyer said that when teaching online, "you have to pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you're assigning activities and assessments [and make] certain everything is perfectly clear to the students," quoted by the news source. In order to teach well online, she added, teachers need guidance.

The results so far have been positive, the news provider suggests. The research team plans to present their preliminary findings on the success of the program to the American Educational Research Association in April.

The online education sector grew 13 percent last year and had been growing at about 20 percent in previous years. Nearly one in four students take at least some college courses online, up from one in 10 in 2002, Reuters reports.