This report arises from the #Openteach: Professional Development for Open Online Educators project, which is funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.The #Openteach project team are based in the Open Education Unit (OEU) at Dublin City University (DCU).
The main aim of the #Openteach project was to produce, and evaluate, evidence-based open professional development for part-time online educators. In anearlier phase of the project a literature review called Teaching Online is Different: Critical perspectives from the literaturewas completed in order to identify online educator roles and the associated competencies for effective online teaching (Ní Shé, Farrell, Brunton, Costello, Donlon, Trevaskis, Eccles, 2019). Concurrently, we conducted a needs analysisreport of the target population, online students and their online educators (Farrell, Brunton, Costello, Donlon, Trevaskis, Eccles, Ní Shé, 2019). These reports were used to guide the development of the professional development resources for the #Openteach open online course.