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Article Excerpt
The Importance of Online Professional Development
In an era of school reform, many consider the education and professional development of teachers as the keystone to educational improvement (Hawley & Valli, 1999). Sparked by a need to meet the student achievement goals mandated by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization and the No Child Left Behind legislation, a plethora of professional development programs have arisen, such that administrators have added workdays devoted to professional development to the school calendar. But this improvement comes at a price in resources and time. During the 1990s, school districts spent the equivalent of $200/pupil per year on professional development (Killeen, Monk, & Plecki, 2002), and professional development adds demands of time and effort to teachers' already overburdened schedules. Although we need to build teachers' capacity for improvement, we also need to be sure that time, effort, and scarce resources are expended only on quality programs that teach with and about best practices.
Unfortunately, many teacher professional development programs are not of high quality, offering "fragmented, intellectually superficial" seminars (Borko, 2004). In addition, these programs are unable to provide ongoing support for teachers as they attempt to implement new curricula or pedagogies (Barnett, 2002). This problem is exacerbated when teachers attempt to implement these new strategies in environments made hostile by reluctant peers or administrators. As a result, teachers often become frustrated with professional development because it is ineffectual or requires large investments of time they do not have. Furthermore, a lack of day-to-day professional support and mentoring for entry-level teachers-assistance that current approaches to professional development generally fail to provide--is a major factor underlying the nearly 50% attrition rate among new teachers within their first 5 years in the classroom (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2003).
The need for professional development that can fit with teachers' busy schedules, that draws on powerful resources often not available locally, and that can create an evolutionary path toward providing real-time, ongoing, work-embedded support has stimulated the creation of online teacher professional development (oTPD) programs. Many of these programs are working to realize other potential benefits of online communities of practice among teachers, such as the opportunities for reflection offered by asynchronous interaction; the contributions of teachers who tend to be silent in face-to-face settings but "find their voice" in mediated interaction; and the unique affordances for learning of immersive virtual simulations (Dede, 2004a). Currently, there are many initiatives in oTPD serving large numbers of educators. A range of objectives for educational improvement underlie these oTPD ventures, such as introducing new curricula, altering teachers' beliefs and instructional and assessment practices, changing school organization and culture, and enhancing relationships between school and community. Generally, these programs are available to teachers at their convenience and can provide just-in-time assistance. In addition, they often give schools access to experts and archival resources that fiscal and logistical constraints would otherwise limit. Furthermore, online professional development programs also are potentially more scalable than those that depend purely on local resources and face-to-face interactions.
However, although such programs are propagating rapidly and consuming substantial resources both fiscally and logistically, little is known about best practices for the design and implementation of these oTPD models. Evidence of effectiveness is often lacking, anecdotal, or based on participant surveys completed immediately after the professional development experience rather than later, when a better sense of long-range impact is attainable. Furthermore, for those researchers interested in long-range impact, funding is rarely available to support it.
In our research, we are studying three emerging interactive media:
(a) multiuser virtual environments in which participants become digital people inside of virtual worlds (http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/),
(b) augmented realities in which participants in a real-world context interact with a virtual setting imposed through wireless mobile devices (http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/ icb.do?keyword=harp), and
(c) academic sociosemantic networking in which participants' patterns of social tagging generate formative, diagnostic information about their mental models (http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=edtags).
Each of these offers novel methods for teacher learning as yet largely unstudied. As discussed later, design-based research (DBR) is a method that offers tangible examples of powerful learning and better ties between theory and practice, while acknowledging learning in context (Dede, 2004b; Squire, 2006). As design-based researchers, the authors know how difficult it is to conduct rigorous research on learning media that are evolving rapidly and concurrently. And yet as challenging as such scholarship is, unless the research issues discussed below are an essential part of studying these innovative technologies, the findings from this work will not prove of much value to the field of teacher learning.
This document sets forward an agenda for research on professional development, delivered via conventional or innovative technologies. The agenda focuses on types of knowledge that are missing or lacking in the current literature for improving oTPD and on assessment of oTPDs' strengths and limitations. In particular, we highlight two areas that should serve as the nucleus of future research ventures: (a) research questions that address understudied areas and (b) design and methodological strategies for studying these questions. We conclude with recommendations on priorities for research in these areas.
Readers may ask what differentiates research about oTPD from scholarship about face-to-face teacher professional development. Certainly, the two approaches share many common themes. Given a particular set of objectives, resources, content, and participants, both online and face-to-face teacher professional development developers ask the following:
* How should the professional development program be designed (content, pedagogical strategies, methods of delivery, and identification of best practices) to maximize its effectiveness?
* What measures of effectiveness and means of evaluation should be used to document the outcomes and impacts of the professional development program?
* What specific tools, if any, should teachers experience as part of the professional development?
* What types of learner interactions should the program foster through its pedagogy and its infrastructure for delivery?
These categories are discussed later in our review of research and would also be central in an overview of research on face-to-face professional development.
The reason for having a specialized research agenda for oTPD is that, although the categories are similar, the menu of options for implementation within each category is different when teacher professional development is delivered online. For example, some pedagogical strategies (e.g., lecture) are likely more effective face-to-face than online, but others (extended rich discussions) may be more effective online than face-to-face: A broader range of participants "find their voice," many people can contribute at the same time, and the period available for discussion is extended. The availability of attractive online options not available in pure face-face teacher professional development is one reason why many programs are moving to blended or hybrid models that attempt to combine the strengths of both.
Furthermore, at a time when many national commissions are calling for all U.S. students to be competitive in a "flat" world characterized by global markets, online professional development offers an additional set of tools and poses a different set of research issues for how teachers become fluent in new technologies (many of them online interactive media) than face-to-face professional development has encountered. The National Research Council (NRC, 2007) Workshop on "Enhancing Professional Development for Teachers: Potential Uses of Information Technology" documented these and other factors that make online learning a unique form of teacher professional development. For these reasons, a research agenda for oTPD that builds on prior scholarship in face-to-face teacher professional development...
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