Abstract

The use of videotaped microlectures as a new medium of teaching has been receiving increased attention in China’s educational reform agenda. Since 2012, microlecture competitions targeting various levels of education have been held nationwide. However, a top–down contest-based approach, while efficiently popularizing the concept of microlectures, may create a false impression among classroom teachers unfamiliar with technology, leading them to confuse microlectures with exhibitions of complex computer and media technologies and, thus, intimidating them from trying the new teaching mode. Using autoethnography to document in detail the author’s production of a nationally awarded microlecture, the present study highlights what classroom teachers can do using technology-mediated teaching and asserts that teachers’ personal practical knowledge, rather than technology, plays the decisive role in producing a microlecture. It also argues that by taking on the dual role of ethnographer-as-researcher and ethnographer-as-informant, classroom teachers can use reflective autoethnography as a meaningful learning experience to understand and critique their teaching practices and develop living educational theories for the enhancement of technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) in massive open online courses (MOOCs).

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