Tiia-Triin TRUUSA, PhD, Baltic Defence College, Tartu, Estonia. Tiia-Triin Truusa currently works at the Baltic Defence College, Tartu Estonia as a Manager of Academic and Outreach Activities in the Dean’s office and also teaches at the University of Tartu. Her research focuses on the sociological approaches to civil-military relations, conscription, and veteran’s issues. She attended one of the editions of NATO DEEP e-instructors’ course.
Question 1. What motivated you to pursue the e-Instructor Certification Programme, and how do you see it benefiting your career?
Thanks to the partnership between Baltic Defence College and NATO DEEP, I received an invite that peaked my interest.
Although military education is mostly conducted on-site, I saw an opportunity to learn more, to have a supporting network and be able to draw upon their knowledge and experience. On top of that, I saw I could perhaps even help students benefit from the network.
Since the end of COVID everybody has been quite happy to attend courses on-site again, however, I am more relaxed about online teaching and online learning. This course was encouraging and helped me expand my understanding of the online and hybrid learning-teaching process.
Question 2. What new skills or knowledge did you gain from the e-Instructor Certification Programme that you find most valuable?
I liked the planning cycle, the method and putting an already familiar ADDIE – model into the online context.
This course helped me to reiterate that the students´ engagement is important and how the instructor can help to follow the subject at hand.
Experiencing the role of the online student at this course helped me to understand how to be a better educator, both online and offline.
Question 3. How do you envision the role of online education evolving in the coming years?
I think the area of online education will keep on evolving. I am wondering how to use AI´s potential for online education, for example if in the future the basic courses will be created using AI. I would really like to know more about this topic.
In addition, we will also see if the military can see that quality education can be done online. As a first step, for example, could be considered online Fridays to a week-long course that is held on-site.
Question 4. What do you find to be the biggest challenge of online education?
One of the challenges in online teaching and learning is having a stable online connection and working devices. Another challenge is tailoring the course to run on different platforms and devices.
For a small educational organization it is a challenge to have a system that supports online teaching in a predominantly face-to face environment.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges is and will continue to be how to educate online educators and to motivate them to keep up with the developments in their own area and also considering technology and the opportunities it presents. It is hard to keep up with all of the developments in the area, but online educators need to have time for self-development, take up opportunities to develop and have networks. They need to be more tech savvy, sometimes beyond being just an online educator, but even have the similar skills as successful content creators have.
Furthermore, online courses can become outdated quite fast and time is needed to rethink and redo the course development cycle.
The interview was conducted by the NATO DEEP eAcademy team