"How" is as important as "What"

How you teach may be almost important as what you teach, especially with respect to technical competence. Pedagogy drives design, delivery, and evaluation of any instruction, but e-learning requires the content delivery occur via technology. The instructor’s ability to use technology may enhance or hinder delivery and/or learning.

I haven’t found any link yet between online instructor technical competence and pedagogy, but consider these two teaching strategies: A constructivist pedagogy, by definition, is student-centered and seeks to create conditions in which the student is responsible for learning, within the context of previous experience and hopefully real-world environments and situations. For the sake of this argument, a behaviorist pedagogy is teacher-centered and seeks to gauge learning based on proper responses to stimuli. Behaviorists often focus on the attainment of measureable objectives.

Using the basic differences between these strategies for my argument, I believe constructivists may have to be more technically competent since the ‘freedom’ they create in the classroom (yes, I’m talking virtual here) may use a number of technologies to achieve the student-centered environment—wikis, blogs, discussion boards, peer reviews. Behaviorists on the other hand may require less technical competence because every part of their lesson plans potentially can be developed using a couple of programs (Word and PowerPoint immediately come to mind). Behaviorists could use other programs or software (arguably some do) to present their material, but variety is not necessarily required. Behaviorists likely can get by with having minimal technological experience. Because behaviorists focus on themselves, students could reasonably expect that all they need do is log in and progress through an orchestrated series of lessons.

I am not advocating that one pedagogy equates to any technical competence capacity. Obviously some level of competence, regardless pedagogy, is required since instructors are going to have to create content and, in some cases, post content online. But the constructivist, in my opinion, possesses greater freedom in deciding what that content will be since students will not generally be restricted to a prescribed lesson plan.

No matter the pedagogy, the instructor must know what technical competence is required to create and deliver content and then make the necessary effort to obtain the required technical competence.