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Article
Online Teaching Communities within Sociology: A Counter Trend to the Marketization of Higher Education
Journal of Teaching in Higher Education (2013)
  • Nathan Palmer, Georgia Southern University
  • April M. Schueths, Georgia Southern University
Abstract
As higher education embraces the ideologies of the market, educators are being asked to teach evermore students with fewer resources. Running counter to the trend of marketization, a decentralized group of educators are taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies (including Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platforms such as Wordpress, etc.) to collaborate online to share teaching resources, support one another, and improve pedagogy. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are online collections of pedagogical content/media that are freely distributed. In addition to resources, communities of educators are coming together to support one another and provide informal mentoring in what we call Online Teaching Community Networks (OTCNs). We review how OERs and OTCNs are forming within the discipline of sociology to illustrate the potential both have to improve pedagogy and support teachers.
Keywords
  • Online teaching communities,
  • Sociology,
  • Counter trend,
  • Marketization,
  • Higher education,
  • Teaching,
  • Teaching communities,
  • Open Educational Resources,
  • OERS
Disciplines
Publication Date
2013
DOI
10.1080/13562517.2013.836097
Citation Information
Nathan Palmer and April M. Schueths. "Online Teaching Communities within Sociology: A Counter Trend to the Marketization of Higher Education" Journal of Teaching in Higher Education Vol. 18 Iss. 7 (2013) p. 809 - 820 ISSN: 1470-1294
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/nathan-palmer/1/