Preparing for Virtual Student Teaching: a Presence + Experience Design Case

Abstract

As online classrooms become more commonplace in K-12 education, teacher education programs seek to better prepare candidates for these contexts and are considering ways to address this additional preparation within their curricula. This article presents a design case of a 2-credit, 10-day, online course that was created to prepare 237 pre-service teachers for student teaching in online environments during the Fall 2020 semester. The Presence + Experience framework guided the design process in this case as designers sought to build a community of online learners within a highly experiential learning environment. This article details the design process with this framework along with its challenges, designers’ experiences, and the resulting product.