GSB faculty members successfully complete the EFMD training programme “Online Teaching Academy: Moving beyond remote teaching to master all aspects of online education”
In May, Associate Professor of the Department of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management Olga Mondrus, Associate Professor of the Department of Financial Management Elena Senatorova, Associate Professor of Department of Marketing Elena Panteleeva and Assistant Professor of the Department of Strategic and International Management Anja Tekic completed the EFMD professional development programme "Online Teaching Academy: Moving beyond remote teaching to master all aspects of online education".
EFMD Online Teaching Academy represents a certified professional development programme that provides participants with the theoretical and practical tools required to design an effective online or blended learning experience based on sound learning-design principles, best practices and trends. The Academy was delivered by leading experts in the sphere of online education. Participants had a chance to understand the value and opportunities of an online environment and learn how to become effective online instructors.
As results of this course, participants gained additional skills how to design a blended or an online learning experience; create rich and holistic interactive experiences to engage students and enhance learning; apply different methods and tools to support online learners like: videoconferences and case discussions, videos, different types of assessments, discussion boards, feedback, different types of interaction, learning analytics; develop and maintain a dynamic online community and support peer-to-peer interactions; design formative and summative assessments, using a range of technology and tools suitable for online learning; design and deliver effective synchronous and asynchronous learning sessions.
Anja Tekic, Assistant Professor of the Department of Strategic and International Management:
For me, there are two most important take-aways from this course. First, online teaching is completely different from face-to-face teaching. We cannot just mirror the usual teaching practices and 80-minute formats in the online environment. Online courses need to be built from scratch – there is an array of completely different approaches and tools that need to be adopted to transfer knowledge, to engage students and to assess their work. Second, online teaching is a team work, where lecturers play only one of the key roles along with the “new kind” of specialists, such as learning technologists, instructional designers and videographers. To create effective online courses, universities need to be ready to invest in building such teams, as well as to be flexible and encourage lecturers to experiment with the new teaching formats and tools of engagement. Challenging, but also very exciting era of digital transformation of education is ahead of us.
Olga Mondrus, Associate Professor of the Department of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management:
Participation in the programme was an exciting learning journey and valuable experience. We went through all challenges which students, professors and other stakeholders might face studying, teaching, and supporting courses online. Now it’s clear that developing and providing online high-quality courses require not only the involvement of a professor but also a dedicated team of learning designers, media designers, forum curators, assistants, methodologists, IT specialists, UX specialists etc. To make such courses on an ongoing basis, a strategy of the whole school should be developed. Time and people resources on creating such courses and tracking their quality are necessary. So, the difference between 'high-quality online teaching' and 'remote/distance teaching' is huge, it’s not just transferring everything you do offline on an online platform. It’s a new world of hard, time-consuming but creative teamwork, new challenges and sources of inspiration.