Online professional development: A primer

Educators have access to a dizzying array of virtual learning opportunities, but they must be mindful that working with colleagues produces some of the best learning.

Online professional development for teachers continues to grow in popularity, as schools and educators look for cheaper, more efficient ways to meet current needs and demands. The number of web sites and other virtual learning opportunities makes it difficult for teachers to make sense of the available opportunities, their content, their quality, and how they fit with their personal learning goals.

As providers of online professional development, we know well the dizzying array of opportunities available to educators. Online professional development can sometimes be a good choice with many benefits to teachers, but, at other times, traditional in-person professional development may be a better fit. How can educators make sense of this ever-growing landscape of online professional learning?

Types of online PD

Despite intense interest in online professional learning, we still have a shortage of shared language around the types of online learning experiences available to teachers. We broadly define online professional development as synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid.

Synchronous online learning activities happen in real time. Examples include distance education courses offered by universities, webinars on specific topics of interest to teachers, and virtual coaching and teacher collaboration opportunities. In general, these opportunities don’t use technology to transform the learning experience; instead, the learning experience resembles in-person professional development in a virtual setting. The facilitator typically oversees a teacher or group of teachers who are participating in the learning experience at the same time or works with groups of teachers working together over time on a project of shared interest. The amount of interactivity can vary widely — from a webinar where participants do little more than listen or type a question in a chat box to a fully collaborative web conference where participants interact as much as they would in a classroom or a school hallway.

Participation in social networks can forge long-term virtual learning communities that may be equally as powerful as in-person professional learning communities.

Asynchronous online learning activities happen at different times for different participants. Examples include teacher social networks, discussion boards and other communities, self-paced online courses (including most MOOCs — massive open online courses), and resource-sharing web sites (including web sites where teachers share lessons/ideas with each other and web sites where external experts share professional learning tools, videos, instructional resources, and so forth with teachers). These activities are often self-directed by the teacher, which means the teacher determines what, how, and when they learn. For instance, a teacher using an asynchronous site may use it for such diverse purposes as downloading a new math lesson, asking questions on a discussion board about assessment, or viewing a video of a science activity in action. In contrast to synchronous activities, these activities are often transformed and defined by the technology. For instance, a self-paced course may feature mostly interactive multimedia presentations, or a resource repository may use sophisticated search engines to give teachers the tools they need.

Hybrid online learning activities take place as part of a larger in-person learning opportunity. Examples include in-person courses or workshops that require virtual collaboration or completion of other online tasks between sessions. These hybrid opportunities may use synchronous or asynchronous online tools, depending on the particular aims of the in-person sessions.

When choosing between these types of online activities, educators must consider their learning goals and styles. Are they looking for certification or course credit? Or are they simply looking for resources, ideas, or collaborative opportunities on certain topics? Do they learn best from structured experiences with formal learning goals? Or do they learn more from self-directed experiences that extend over time and topic? The answers to these questions are often surprising. For instance, we have found in our own work that educators request structured courses and webinars on our online learning platforms but end up participating far more in the asynchronous opportunities for collaboration and resource sharing that already exist on those platforms.

Above all, educators must ask whether online learning really provides a benefit over in-person professional development for a particular learning goal.

When online works best

Online professional development is a particularly good choice in five situations.

#1. A subset of teachers needs specific professional development that is not part of the school/district plan for that year. School districts generally plan a year’s professional development initiatives around particular topics or subjects, to align with the adoption of a new curriculum/program, or to meet the requirements of a new external demand like the Common Core State Standards. This kind of job-embedded, sustained, collaborative professional development is usually a great solution for busy teachers. But sometimes new teachers (or even veteran teachers) need immediate help with topics that aren’t part of the district’s professional development plan for the year. In these cases, teachers can make good use of online learning to meet their personal needs. For instance, we frequently enroll teachers in our online courses on implementing an elementary mathematics curriculum when the teachers’ districts conducted initial workshops on the curriculum years ago and don’t have the infrastructure to provide such workshops again.

When is online a better fit than face-to-face professional development? And vice versa?

#2. Particular expertise is not available in a school or district but is available online. School districts often need external experts to help make sense of new standards, programs, and initiatives. In many cases, such experts can be brought in to assist with in-person professional development or to speak to specific groups of teachers. In other cases, more extended interaction with a particular type of expertise is needed. Online learning can be useful for these more extended interactions. For instance, we offer monthly webinars where teachers can interact and coplan lessons with the writers of an elementary mathematics curriculum, giving teachers regular access to expertise that would be difficult to provide at scale in any other format.

#3. Teachers need access to colleagues with similar interests, but these colleagues are not available at their home schools. Professional learning communities are an excellent source of job-embedded development for many teachers. However, many teachers — due to time, financial, or geographic constraints — don’t have access to such communities. For instance, in some small or rural schools, teachers have no grade-level colleagues with whom to discuss and coplan lessons. In other instances, teachers have a particular interest — such as the infusion of technology into the classroom or teaching ELL students — that is not shared by any other teacher in the school. The many teacher social networks and resource repositories available online can help teachers find collaborative colleagues, tools, and ideas for a particular learning goal. Participation in these networks can forge long-term virtual learning communities that may be equally as powerful as in-person professional learning communities.

#4. Teachers’ immediate needs prohibit more powerful professional learning experiences. Teachers are often unable to engage in deeper professional learning if their immediate needs aren’t being met. For instance, research on teacher leaders has shown that they spend much time and effort building trust with teachers through the provision of instructional tools and material supports before they are able to move on to the more serious work of critiquing and coaching instructional practice (Mangin & Stoelinga, 2011). Online professional development can’t replace this kind of relationship building nor should it. But teachers can be pointed to the plethora of available online resource repositories, which are brimming with lesson plans, assessments, videos of lessons in action, and other tools to meet immediate needs. Doing so can allow teachers (and professional developers) to focus less on meeting needs and more on the true work of improving instructional practice — work that is best done in person. Furthermore, discussing and adapting existing tools teachers find online — as part of building relationships with a coach or teacher leader — can be a far more valuable use of professional development time than creating such tools from scratch.

#5. Online professional development is significantly cheaper or more feasible than in-person development, but the quality is equivalent. Schools often have to use online professional development for financial reasons. Individual teachers also may enroll in online courses because they fit better than in-person courses into their schedules. Online learning can be as good as, if not better than, in-person learning (Fishman et al., 2013), but educators must research the quality of an online opportunity and not make a decision based on cost or convenience alone. Furthermore, educators must understand that online professional learning is cheaper on the user end but not always on the developer end. Developing online learning involves costs such as content creation, initial programming, data storage, and site maintenance. Developers often find the funding to create online learning opportunities but not to sustain them over time. For this reason, educators should check on the sustainability plans for online professional development opportunities before investing much time and effort in them.

One big challenge

Learning of any kind is best done collaboratively with supportive colleagues and facilitators who can push thinking, provide accountability structures, and ensure a quality learning experience. Relying on online professional development becomes dangerous when the learning is too independent and isolated. This problem may be difficult for teachers to identify on their own, as online professional development opportunities often have the appearance of being collaborative without being truly so (e.g., participating in a webinar with 100 people but never interacting with any of those people; contributing to a social network but never getting responses to any posts).

When choosing between types of online activities, educators must consider their learning goals and styles.

A few examples from our own work illustrate these points. We operate a widely used professional learning platform that features a repository of classroom videos designed to promote teacher reflection. When we examined the videos teachers select to view on this platform as well as the comments teachers leave on these videos, we found some interesting trends. Although most videos are designed for teacher reflection, teachers viewed videos designed for pure demonstration. In other words, they chose the most practical videos over the ones most likely to lead to learning. Similarly, teacher comments on the videos were more likely to be evaluative, akin to giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the teaching in the video, than reflective about the student thinking and pedagogy on display. These findings echo research on teacher resource repositories, which has shown that teachers often struggle to choose high-quality resources, instead relying on superficial data to make decisions about resource selection (Abramovich & Schunn, 2012).

These findings lead us to a simple conclusion: School-based collaboration is still necessary, maybe even more necessary, in an environment where teachers are participating in independent online learning activities. Imagine how much more effective online learning would be if teachers shared resources they found online with colleagues and discussed the quality and fit of those resources with the school’s goals for student learning. Or imagine if teachers met to watch online classroom videos together, pushing each other to discuss key aspects of the pedagogy. This thinking even extends to the synchronous online experiences: We often find that teachers get more out of our webinars or courses when they participate along with colleagues from their school. Others at a school also can benefit when a teacher shares learning from an online university course with colleagues.

As providers of online professional development, we’ve encouraged collaboration rather than independent use of our platforms. For instance, we’ve held virtual video clubs (Sherin & van Es, 2009) to engage groups of teachers in discussing videos on our web site and have designed online courses to show comments from previous learners in order to push the current learner’s thinking. But knowing how important collaboration is to learning and how effective job-embedded professional development can be, we challenge educators who are seeking online learning opportunities: Use online learning to meet your personal needs, but find ways to take that learning back to your school. Your own professional growth, as well as the growth of your colleagues, will be the better for it.

References

Abramovich, S. & Schunn, C. (2012). Studying teacher selection of resources in an ultra-large scale interactive system: Does metadata guide the way? Computers & Education, 58, 551-559.

Fishman, B., Konstantopoulos, S., Kubitskey, B.W., Vath, R., Park, G., Johnson, H., & Edelson, D.C. (2013). Comparing the impact of online and face-to-face professional development in the context of curriculum implementation. Journal of Teacher Education, 64 (5), 426-438.

Mangin, M. & Stoelinga, S.R. (2011). Peer? Expert? Teacher leaders struggle to gain trust while establishing their expertise. JSD, 32 (3), 48-51.

Sherin, M.G. & van Es, E.A. (2009). Effects of video club participation on teachers’ professional vision. Journal of Teacher Education, 60 (1), 20-37.

Citation: Bates, M.S., Phalen, L., & Moran, C. (2016) Online professional development: A primer. Phi Delta Kappan, 97 (5), 70-73.