Are Online Courses Effective for Professional Development?

Lessons from a Decade of Experimentation

By Robert Tinker

Online courses have generated a lot of controversy. Some say they are going to revolutionize education and render current arrangements obsolete. Others claim they are a fad that will soon vanish. A decade of experimenting with online professional development has given us important insights into this debate.

Ten years ago we identified the potential of online courses for teacher professional development. We developed a year-long course for teachers on inquirybased learning in secondary math and science, called INTEC. The design of that course became the “Concord e-Learning Model” for online courses: high-quality, inquiry-based activities that all participants undertake and then discuss online using asynchronous, moderated groups led by a trained facilitator.

INTEC had a profound impact on teachers as evidenced by responses like these:

“I have been changed as a teacher, and that change has been for the better.”

“The kids liked it a lot. They responded more so with those [INTEC materials] than many other things, because they ‘empowered’ them. It gave credit to their own thinking.”

We also learned two complementary lessons from the INTEC experience:

The Concord e-Learning Model really works. Online asynchronous discussions about shared experiences can result in profound, lasting learning when a reflective community is cultivated by both course design and the moderator.

The moderator role is critical. The best approach is to train moderators in an online course that models the same design. This experience led to our influential book Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators and to our online “metacourses.”

We also started in 1996 the Virtual High School, a pioneer in online courses for secondary students. The key innovation of VHS was a course for teachers on how to create and facilitate online courses, called the Teachers Learning Conference (TLC). This intensive online professional development course was similar to INTEC. TLC was also 120-plus hours and based on the Concord e-Learning Model, though the motivation was much higher, because a school could not enroll their students until one or more of their teachers completed the online course.

The course is difficult, but rewarding as the following quotes testify:

“The TLC training course has given me a shot of adrenaline at a time when I had begun to look ahead favorably toward retirement.”

“Legislators often lament the quality of teachers. If they could only contact any of the TLC participants! They are student oriented, creative, and enthusiastic.”

Five years ago we felt that the technology available to teachers was finally able to support the integration of video case studies into online courses (see “Lights, Camera, Action” on page 7). This was the birth of the Seeing Math project that is extensively reported in this issue.

In that project, we built courses around a more manageable five-week time frame, and also included interactive software (see “Interaction and Interactivity” on page 8). These video and software technologies don’t change the basic Concord e-Learning Model, but they do augment it in important ways. The case studies stimulate deep conversations about how teachers respond to student thinking. Investigations based on the software give teachers a way to “brush up” on their content knowledge by looking at familiar content from a new perspective. The software is free and can be used in classrooms, so the new insights can be applied immediately to teaching. In addition, many of the video case studies document how teachers use the software in their classes.

This decade of experimentation has convinced us that online teacher professional development can be effective. Well-designed online courses with rich content have great educational potential, but careful design and well-trained facilitators are required.

Robert Tinker (bob@concord.org) is President of the Concord Consortium.