What is my research all about? And how did it all get started? I have been working as a teacher for almost two decades now. All this time I’ve always been interested in planning and designing various guides, processes and checklists in order to help others and make life easier. I started online teaching early on in my career, but even then my focus was always in pedagogy, rather than technology. Although I have to admit I like a bit of tech, too…

When my employer TUAS decided to transform our International Business from a traditional on-site daytime degree programme into an online degree programme, I had the opportunity to investigate how a pedagogical approach could be taken into consideration throughout the design of a degree programme in an online environment. Moreover, at TUAS has a specific pedagogical approach, Innovation Pedagogy, which utilises teaching and learning methods that had to be considered in the online implementation of the degree programme.

I started my research with collaboration between various stakeholders to create the below Pedagogically Informed Model for Online Degrees (PIMOD). I have presented this model so far in the following conferences: eAPRIL 2017, XIII National Symposium of Higher Education Research in Finland 2017 and FERA Conference on Education 2018.

I am currently developing the model further through design-based research by investigating the experiences of online degree programme teachers, online degree programme students and those coordinating online degree programmes at other HEIs. In addition, I am looking into international and intercultural aspects of online degree education and how that can be considered in the design of the online degree programme. Each stage brings new aspects to the model, giving it a more holistic approach. I will be sharing some of the key results here as they become available.