Symposium 6: Impact of remote and technology-enhanced learning strategies in sport coaching and coach development: Current advances and future recommendations

Technology enhanced learning has the potential to impact both athlete and coach development. To date, our understanding of the ways technology can better facilitate learning of technical and psychosocial skills in athletes/coaches, and how information and communication technologies are best integrated into online and remote coaching and coach development (ORC/CD) is limited. This symposium highlights the emerging work stemming from the International Sports Coaching Journal’s special issue on technology enhanced learning in coaching. We explore current advances of effective online remote coaching practice, considerations for online coach development, and offer philosophical suggestions to underpin future research. Eagles and Callary analyze the impact of remote online coaching on the coach-athlete relationship between kettlebell athletes and their online coaches. Hodgson and colleagues outline the skills required of coach developers when designing an online coach development course, which includes choosing a pedagogical model and agreeing a target audience and learning outcomes. Fyall and Bennett investigate how online coach development environments have been conceptualised in the Pacific region, with a particular focus on the value participants place on the online experience. Last, and to guide future research approaches, Szedlak and Bennett position ORC/CD within the philosophical framework of the New Culture of Learning (Thomas & Brown, 2011) and propose a novel onto-epistemological approach for ORC/CD researchers, which considers the theory of connectivism (Siemens, 2005) as an expression of New Materialism. Furthermore, they offer a working definition of ORC/CD to guide the quickly emerging field of ORC/CD research.