Students’ experiences of navigating online teaching practice modules

Globally, more and more institutions are moving to offer open distance e-learning (ODeL) opportunities for distance education students. With this move to an online mode of teaching and learning, the focus has also shifted from a teacher-centered distance education pedagogy to a student-centered ODeL pedagogy with a strong emphasis on student success through improved student support to promote Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) – Quality Education of the United Nations. While literature reveals a need for improved student support in an ODeL context, it is limited concerning the support needs of student teachers in specifically their ODeL teaching practice modules. With the aim of improving the support offered to ODeL students in a South African context, the authors of this chapter therefore set out to investigate student teacher experiences with teaching practice modules in an ODeL environment. This qualitative case study investigated the experiences of 30 student teachers studying teacher education at an ODeL institution. The module evaluation forms of students from two teaching practice modules were used to collect data. The findings revealed that the students participating in the study struggled with online placement for their teaching practice, had varied experiences with online communication in the modules and had overall positive experiences with ODeL learning. We recommend an upgrade of online tools to facilitate student use and the establishment of a diverse communication system to meet the needs of all students. We believe that fully online teaching practice systems will open up future research activities.