Online Courses for Preparing Physical Education Teachers for Inclusion of Children with Disabilities in Their Classes: A Systematic Review

Inclusive education has spread worldwide during the two first decades of the 21st century. While in Israel about 40% of children with disabilities are still maintained within the special education system, legislation from 2018 attempted to increase the number of these children attending school within the regular school system. One of the major challenges facing the education system is the lack of teachers` knowledge about teaching students with various disabilities in the school system. This has led to reduced self-efficacy, and subsequently to a lack of willingness to find proper adaptations for including these children in the regular classes. This situation has been reported in numerous studies describing teachers` and students` perspectives within the physical education (PE) system. Nevertheless, in many countries only one course in the curriculum addresses this issue, often in a theoretical manner, and as a result student teachers are not acquiring inclusion strategies and skills. The outcome of this is diminished participation of the students with disability in PE practice.

Twenty-first century pedagogy addresses students born into a society that intensively applies media and communication technology. Current pedagogies claim that students should be involved in active and self-directed learning processes (McLoughlin & Lee, 2010). Three domains of skill acquisition are emphasized: (1) creativity and innovation skills; (2) critical thinking and problem solving skills; and (3) communication and collaborative skills (Ministry of Education, 2013). One way of addressing knowledge and skills to large student communities is online education, which has also been applied within PE teacher education programs.

The purpose of the current paper is to review online course practices and outcomes as presented in the scientific literature pertaining to inclusion preparation of PE teachers, and to propose a concept for the further development of this teaching modality. The search was conducted within Google Scholar, Sport Discus (via EBSCO host) and Pubmed data-bases, using the terms inclusion, physical education, teachers, online, web, course. Inclusion criteria were articles in English or Hebrew including data collection and published in either scientific journal or congress proceedings.

Results of the search included four journal articles and one congress proceeding. Two articles included controlled group designs and the other two qualitative inquiries. One article included a retrospective analysis of study outcomes. The outcomes support the potential of online courses to supplement and partially replace traditional frontal knowledge-based courses.