Online educational resource development: supporting the educator

The Internet is one of the most important means for collecting and sharing knowledge and for providing educational services. Teachers play a key-role for the enhancement of the educational process and to this end, their training and professional development is considered to be a strategic goal at international, European and National level. Targeting the issue of supporting teachers in the design of learning activities and educational material based on modern learning theories, the current PhD thesis has posed its key opening question: how do teachers design and create reusable educational resources for distance learning, in order to help learners to develop cognitive skills and critical thinking? The methodology described in this thesis, addresses this question by investigating the needs, preferences and attitudes of teachers regarding distance education. A number of key issues are therefore highlighted in this work, these include: (1) the need to develop suitable educational material and provide adequate teacher support; (2) the need to reinforce interaction and communication in distance education through synchronous distant educational activities; (3) the need to strengthen motivation and interaction via asynchronous educational activities which use audiovisual material; the need to consider how availability of time affects development and adaptation of educational resources in integrated “educational packages”. The results and the proposed solutions fall within the scientific area of Learning Design and provide alternatives for the re-consideration of dysfunctional approaches in designing, developing, distributing, modifying, reusing, monitoring and supporting the creation of sequences of educational activities. The work carried ΢ππξίδσλ Υ. Παπαδάθεο out includes the design, development, implementation and integration of software tools and methods, such as: a) the WCP (Web Cast Producer) for the creation of webcast learning objects by teachers themselves, b) the functionality of synchronous virtual classes, c) the LVS (Learning via Subtitling) for the development of learning activities based on subtitling audiovisual content and d) the Q&A CS-Wizard (Cognitive Skills Wizard) in the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) for the support of the educators-authors of lesson plans/learning design in cultivating a significant part of cognitive skills and in developing the critical thinking of the learners