Chapter 9: Educational Psychology Instructors: Applying Theories-Informed and Evidence-Based Practices

Online courses, whether hybrid, blended, flipped, asynchronous, or synchronous, are increasingly in demand at institutions of higher education in the United States (Allen et al., 2016). Online and distance learning courses in higher education outnumber traditional and face-to-face courses with over 6 million students enrolled (Graham, 2019). Hence, there is an urgent need in higher education to support educators to design and implement quality instruction in an online learning environment. To provide readers with practical yet evidence-based advice, we identified five challenges that instructors of educational psychology may face when teaching preservice teachers online, and then made corresponding suggestions to address the identified difficulties, supported by research and educational psychology theories and informed by our own teaching experiences. Specifically, challenge one pertains to the faculty/instructors’ professional development and challenges two through five are mainly relevant to specific teaching practices and facilitations in online settings. We did not narrow the scope of this chapter to a specific modality of online teaching, and broadly included contexts of online learning such as synchronous, asynchronous, fully online or blended instruction in our discussion so that instructors and faculty who are teaching online classes of different modalities can benefit.