This session examines the journey of teaching in an online Master's program, detailing the goal of content delivery: to motivate and accelerate student learning in an online learning environment. This presentation describes the research behind actor's training and presents tools to assist teachers in connecting its learners with program content.
This session examines the journey of teaching in an online Master's program, detailing the goal of content delivery: to motivate and accelerate student learning in an online learning environment. Detailing a year long research study between an education professor and a theater professor, this session carefully lays out the importance of rethinking the prioritation of online classroom design and instruction. In recent years, online programming extensively focused on user navigation, technology advances and tools, content preparation, and course design. However, the delivery of instruction was often overlooked and lacked innovation in its approaches. This presentation describes the research behind the usage of actor's training, its benefits to instructors and students, and presents practical tools to assist teachers in connecting its learners with program content.
It does not take a great leap of imagination to think of the instructor's job and an actor’s job as being quite similar. This similarity gave way to considering how instructors (i.e. teachers and professors) are trained to deliver content material to an online class. The oral delivery of material is not the only skill associated with Acting from which the pre-service teacher would benefit. Most actor training programs include Improvisation as a vital part of the curriculum. The Author of Theatre Games For The Classroom, Viola Spolin (1986) is widely credited to be one of the founders of the modern method of training in Improvisation. These works, among others, will be a vital part of the actor’s training that will be utilized with online instructors (adapted from Capel & Kern, 2014 IRB).