A Pedagogical Perspective on Online Teaching

In this paper the authors discuss if and how pedagogical principles, originally developed for on-campus courses, can be equally applicable to online courses. The authors present and argue for six pedagogical principles that guide the development of current and future courses at a large Scandinavian business school; academic challenge, interaction and collaboration, engagement and motivation, diversity and flexibility, academic socialization, and personal development and integrity.
The authors describe how these pedagogical principles guided a recent online initiative in which three fully online courses were developed. Based on post-course in-depth interviews with 19 students, the authors discuss to which degree the pedagogical principles were met in the online setting. They conclude that online courses are largely able to support existing pedagogical principles and thereby become an integrated rather than independent form of teaching and learning. Finally, the challenges and dilemmas that surfaced as a consequence of the alignment of the online format and the pedagogical principles are discussed.