H. Wu, S. Larsen, and G. Andersson (Norway)
Web-based learning, pedagogical education, online classperformance, data analysis.
Early childhood teacher education in Norway is on demand education defined by the Norwegian government. As a result, the vocational training for on-job early childhood teachers is an attractive and necessary education offer for this target teacher group. It is a natural thought to apply advanced technology, such as online or computer-assisted learning, in this kind of education offer so this education offer becomes accessible and affordable for teachers. There are however, many challenges and debatable issues for such an approach, for example, how to handling advanced technology and bringing motivations among the learners to work online and become familiar with computers. Is this a powerful weapon to support their learning environment or just a stressful wagon to drive them into confusion? The present study has introduced and analyzed a case of online and computer-assisted learning for such vocational teacher training at stfold University College. The case was sampled from an early childhood teacher class with 20 on-job vocational teachers. It was applied online web based virtual classroom, combined with face-to-face meetings throughout the training period. There were 4 major topics, Pedagogical Education, Mathematics, English and Norwegian, which divided into 4 independent courses, each with an own online web-based virtual classroom. The analysis focuses on candidates' expectations, their online class performance, their feedback and comments to the courses, and how their online behavior similarly contra differently at their each course or topic.
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