 Fall 2000 | Table of Contents | Library Index | CC Home | Related Links |
Advice for Creating Quality Online Professional Development
by Cynthia McIntyre
and Bonnie Elbaum
with contributions from Concord Consortium staff
 hile the goals are different for each professional development NetCourse that we teach, the pedagogy and methodology are similar. Four years ago, when we first began offering a NetCourse on how to bring inquiry into science and math classrooms, the effectiveness of online professional development was largely untested and unproven. The medium was in its infancy. Our course was one of the first large-scale efforts to deliver online professional development to teachers, and its successes and failures raised awareness in the education community about using the Internet for delivery of professional development. Since then we have gone on to develop other NetCourses in online course development and moderation of online discussions.We have come to recognize, through our experience, some key ingredients to successful online professional development. Through feedback from evaluators, teachers and our own observations, we have also recognized some things we did wrong. Others can learn from our mistakes and successes. For starters, here are ten things to think about when developing online professional development for teachers.
Commitment is important. If someone else (e.g., a principal or technology coordinator) signs up teachers for an online course, completion rates plummet. Teachers have to have a strong personal motivation to participate--for example, the content is clear and compelling or they are receiving graduate credit or they have paid tuition. In our first online professional development course, INTEC, many teachers thought they were signing up for a "technology" course, not a course on the pedagogy of inquiry, because they were signed up by their technology coordinators. The ensuing confusion and disappointment was reflected in the low overall completion rate. On the other hand, of those participants who paid for graduate credit, 71% completed the practicum. Of the 51% who were receiving continuing education credits, the completion rate was 74%. But overall, we found that providing course credits has a greater motivational appeal if associated with a degree or certificate program. Professional development points or CE units have motivational value but are not as effective as programs that are more generous in their points or require less effort. In the case of our Virtual High School™ two-semester online professional development course, the completion incentive is clearer: the course is a pre-requisite for teachers wanting to participate in VHS™. If a teacher failed to complete the course, the school's VHS participation might be put into jeopardy. Having a clear motivation for signing up is important. Teachers sign up (or are signed up) for many different reasons, and in districts that provide the right incentives, the completion rates are higher. On the other hand, don't ask for too much. If the NetCourse is long (INTEC was 26 weeks) the commitment can be overwhelming. Shorter courses (no more than 12 or 15 weeks) create higher completion rates and more flexibility for teachers. They can finish the course before other priorities take over.
A wide variety of activities provides a balanced approach to learning professional development content online. Participants should be assigned a mix of online and offline activities--offline activities can be as simple as reading from a textbook or as intricate as working with a CBL (Calculator Based Lab). In several of our NetCourses, participants are asked to sum up their experiences with a creative final project that can take the form of anything from a poem to a visual essay. Because the online environment is heavily weighted towards the language arts (in that reading and writing skills are key to a student's success), a variety of online and offline activities, particularly those that tap into different learning styles, are crucial. We've found mixed results when adding a face-to-face component to an online professional development course. When we first started INTEC, many projects had reported that it was difficult to create effective online communities of teachers, particularly at the secondary level. So we hedged our bets and built in a face-to-face local study group. In retrospect we see that the site-based team sapped online discussion and adversely affected recruitment and motivation. We now know it's possible to build a strong online community without a face-to-face component. VHS teachers have reported this time and again. VHS has also had good results from including a limited face-to-face component to one of their professional development courses.
A NetCourse experience is enriched when participants feel that they are part of a community of learners, who are in it together. By creating a community, participants are less likely to feel isolated in the online medium. Instead, they work within a support structure of individuals who are invested in the group's success. In addition to ice-breaking activities, designed to tap into the creativity and individuality of each participant, we provide a place online where participants are encouraged to "hang out," share personal stories or professional news. With this space for human interactions, bonds are formed. Without it, there are one or two inevitable outcomes: the social and personal creeps into content-rich discussions, diluting their educational potency, or teachers fail to fully interact and the discussion area becomes a series of one-way postings where participants simply hand in work.
When we first started teaching online professional development courses, the technology environment in schools was quite different. The most common access to the Internet by our participants was AOL via a modem. In VHS, we found schools with a single telephone modem connected to a network accessed by multiple computers delivered even poorer performance. Keeping these limitations in mind, INTEC included text-based pages in its user interface design. These may be faster to load, but graphics are important for demonstrating a concept or illustrating a point. Even so, it's important to recognize that page-loading time is an issue. Designing for the smallest page size, creating graphics that are compressed, using animated GIFs instead of QuickTime or MOV files help speed up the tedium of waiting for a page to appear. Today, as urban schools get wired, more bandwidth is becoming available. Rural America, however, is still often limited to less than telephone modem speeds.
It's hard to think of a more important issue for all NetCourses than quality. With the huge growth in online course offerings, an educator might not be able to separate the wheat from the chaff of online professional development. Quality control standards are essential. The National Content and Curriculum Standards that we use for VHS was developed by a group of university-level distance learning experts, state department of education curriculum experts, and VHS teachers, trainers, and administrators. It lists criteria for high quality online courses. It's important to set standards and constantly have them reviewed by knowledgeable experts. In INTEC, we did not adequately educate our advisory boards about the criteria for a good course. And we should have solicited more input from potential participants about what they needed. Adequate needs assessment is a companion to quality control. Make sure the course is a good match for what the participant needs. Find out if the potential participant has prior experience with online professional development. A great course is worthless if it addresses the wrong content.
|
A successful professional development NetCourse must fit into participants' busy schedules. All our NetCourses are offered on a scheduled asynchronous basis--participants get online based on their own schedule, at daybreak with a cup of coffee or at 3 a.m. wearing their pajamas. Assignments have weekly due dates, and participants must post to the discussion area throughout each week, but within those guidelines there is freedom to work when it is most convenient. A scheduled asynchronous NetCourse allows teachers from around the world to work unhindered by geography, time zones, or local scheduling constraints.
All successful online professional development courses need a space for communication. The class discussions that take place in our NetCourses are at the core of learning. Threaded dialogues with comments, responses, and comments to responses are displayed in a chronological and logical order that's easy to follow. Unlike email listservs or synchronous chat, discussions are permanently recorded and available to all students in one central location. Because they're not time-bound and there is no need to "raise your hand" to speak, participants think about what they're going to say before saying it, which gives the course greater depth. Participants can reply to course content questions on readings, share feelings about the process and nature of their learning, and respond to their colleagues' inquiries. The NetCourse instructor must establish posting requirements, otherwise participation is spotty; when participants find a discussion area continually devoid of discussion, there's little reason for them to come back. By establishing participation guidelines and encouraging participant-to-participant interaction, a NetCourse creates a community of learners who are invested in the course and in furthering not only their own learning but that of their classmates. Too many online courses revert to the traditional "sage on the stage" model: publishing lectures and funneling knowledge in a one-way direction, from teacher to student. Learning is dependent on discussion between the participants about the content of the activities. The approach we developed is captured in the book Facilitating Online Learning, written by a group here at The Concord Consortium, and taught in our online professional development course Moving Out of the Middle. The goal of this approach is to facilitate dialogue between students rather than through the moderator. Dynamic and thoughtful interactions don't happen automatically. A facilitator is needed to guide participants from the side and help them engage in meaningful discussion, which makes the connection between the course content and their own teaching practices. Without some kind of imposed order, a discussion area becomes chaotic and overwhelming--a space where few have the energy or motivation to participate.
A new creativity is often generated from NetCourse participants collaborating in team activities that emphasize making decisions, defining teammates' roles, and creating a final product together. Sample group activities include participants working in pairs to review each other's work, small group discussions, solving a mystery based on instructor clues, writing a report together, or creating a web page or PowerPoint presentation as a team. Like the mix of offline and online activities, a successful online course must include both independent work and teamwork. While independent study alone is a viable option for education in certain circumstances, a course is a course precisely because of the collaboration between learners involved.
Assessment in our professional development courses is based on participation and completion of assignments. Because participants can feel estranged in an online course, providing timely evaluations of work is critical. Weekly or bi-weekly evaluations are essential. Private discussion threads provide further opportunities for discussing evaluations. Peer feedback and self-assessment are both hallmarks of a good NetCourse. Each type of software used to deliver a course online has its own unique system for evaluation and assessment. Make sure the one you choose provides the assessment needs you require. Software that allows all work to be collected and stored in a centralized, searchable database is handy because it allows the instructor and participant to access a permanent record of work in one location. The instructor can easily sort and search to find problem areas, samples of best work, and powerful evidence of how a student's thinking has changed and progressed over time.
One of our objectives has been to deliver professional development courses at a rate less than that of a traditional face-to-face program. A key to doing this is scalability--growing without creating everything from scratch each time. One of the ways we have done this is by using moderators for the online discussion. The pyramid structure we've used, with expert moderators providing support to groups of cohort moderators, works and is less expensive than using course experts to moderate. Moderators are not experts in the field, but facilitators trained in course moderation. Our experience with online professional development courses, such as Moving Out of the Middle, proves moderators can be trained to support an online course. Using trained moderators allows us to build a support structure without adding to operational costs. Theoretically, it would seem possible to amortize course costs over time by continuing to offer the same course repeatedly, but realistically, any online professional development course worth its salt is evaluating feedback and making changes on a regular basis. So developing creative ways to scale while at the same time keeping costs down is important. What's Next? Here at The Concord Consortium we're working with the Jason Foundation for Education to create probe-based activities for professional development courses for middle grade science teachers. At the Curry School at the University of Virginia and Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, we are providing faculty development netseminars. Our newest project, the Seeing Math Telecommunications Project, will deliver teacher professional development using video case studies. Only four years ago these kinds online courses were virtually unheard of. Today they're an essential part of professional development education.
Cynthia McIntyre and Bonnie Elbaum are co-facilitators for the Netcourse Instructional Methodologies course. |
|
Fall 2000 | Table of Contents | Library Index | CC Home | Related Links
Copyright © 2000 The Concord Consortium, All rights reserved. Last updated: 13-October-00 |
All Contents Copyright © 2008, The Concord Consortium.
All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy
This page was last updated 03/07/2005