Teacher Online Professional Development

Project Director: Tom Duffy

We are beginning our seventh year of the Learning to Teach with Technology Studio (LTTS) project, which was originally supported by the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. It has resulted in the development of more than 60 courses that are designed around guided problem solving. Students begin with a curriculum problem and end with a lesson plan they can apply in their classroom and a conceptually linked rationale for that lesson. Learning is centered around the design of inquiry lessons, integration of technology as a tool for inquiry, and meeting curriculum standards. While learners can start at any time and are self-paced, they receive one-on-one mentoring. We have had over 600 learners from 8 countries in the last three years, approximately 70% of whom are in the schools and 23% in pre-service. Research, embedded in the natural participation of learner, has examined mentoring strategies (the importance of the social presence of the mentor), online learning strategies (through an analysis of click stream data), the impact of LTTS learning experiences on teaching practices, and the perceived benefit of the LTTS courses as a function of characteristics of the teachers. Our design work this last year focused on the development of tools to support the one-on-one mentoring, including: learning management tools for mentors and a conversational agent that can supplement the work of the mentor.

We have three different expectations for the year ahead. The research includes a study of the use of the conversational agent to provide direct instruction on learner centered principles. Many learners have to be prodded to attend to the conceptual materials and thus the agent will provide mini-lectures on learner-centered principles as they apply to each task. In addition to that project, we hope to receive funding to evaluate the impact of LTTS on teaching practices and student learning through direct observation and measurement in the classroom. A second area of work next year is the adaptation of LTTS to provide courses of varying length to national park service employees. This is a project in the planning stages with the EPPLEY Institute in Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (HPER). The nature of their context will call for some new LTTS models and, we expect, an important role for the conversational agent. The major new initiative is the beginning of a new 5-year, multimillion dollar project with the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) (funded by the USDOE Ready to Teach Program) to develop the next generation of models of teacher professional development. We will be developing models to link online support to different onsite PD models, e.g., coaching and community models.