Abstract
The paper focuses on the analysis of the effectiveness of virtual co-teaching. Virtual co-teaching is an emerging form of learning that uses the physical presence of one educator and the virtual presence of another.
Thus, it allows teachers or experts who cannot be physically present for various reasons to join the teaching process. This specific form of teaching is being developed within a project supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic at the Faculty of Education of Charles University.
However, for its wide use it is necessary to verify the effectiveness of the virtual form of co-teaching, to identify and describe its possibilities, but also its obstacles and limitations, which is the aim of the present paper. In order to achieve the research objective, i.e. to determine whether virtual co-teaching is equally effective in meeting the lesson objectives and to describe its possibilities, advantages, obstacles and limitations, we chose a case study design.
This is a qualitative methodological approach that analyses and describes in detail aspects of the case under study, which is virtual co-teaching in the classroom. The case study design is characterized by a detailed analysis and description of the case through in-depth and multi-source information gathering (Hendl, 2016, Švaříček and Šeďová, 2014), which is key to truly understanding the phenomena under study in their natural context.
In line with the case study approaches, we used both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches to describe the case under study in detail. However, the qualitative part was the core part, relying on individual and group semi-structured interviews (2 individual and 2 group interviews were conducted in total), document analysis and structured classroom observations (2 observations were conducted).
The results of the implemented lessons projected the students' knowledge and were then verified in accordance with the whole experiment by means of a knowledge test.