Course on Creating Effective Asynchronous Learning Units for Teachers in Higher Education

The techno-pedagogical skills that higher education teachers developed during Covid-19 did not always yield effective, long-lasting online teaching. One reason lies in the differences between Emergency Remote Teaching and online learning. While many higher education teachers learned how to use the same teaching materials remotely, they did not learn how to adapt these materials to fit online instruction. This paper presents a post-Covid training program for higher education teachers on how to build effective blended or asynchronous teaching units. The program includes asynchronous as well as face-to-face components, addressing teachers' techno-pedagogic skill gaps. It was designed to provide the higher education teachers with a method for preparing effective videos for teaching using simple tools. Following Mayer's principles of multimedia teaching, we demonstrated how to transform an existing PPT presentation, created for in-class teaching, into effective online material. Each participant prepared a video for teaching and a joint assignment. A pilot program was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in August 2021 with three pilot groups. We concluded that it is critical to have technical and pedagogical knowledge, but we must also address the motivational issues associated with changing working habits and beliefs about learning that are part of moving into online teaching.