Priorities for Professional Development

We've conducted one to one interviews, and an online survey with 95 educators from Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, and Africa about their professional development priorities since teaching and learning has gone online.

Here are 4 things that we’ve learned:

1. Since the coronavirus epidemic, 90% of educators have experienced teaching online, and 57% say they are above average or highly proficient in their ability to teach online.
2. 77% of educators spend between 1 - 5 hours a week on professional development. 36% of professional development comes from their professional learning networks, and 26% from online courses.
3. Educators want professional development from other educators that have a pedagogical purpose. “CPD needs to be more than ‘how-to’ tutorials. Teachers need to hear from fellow teachers who can implement technologies or strategies with a pedagogical purpose. This is sometimes lacking in online teacher CPD. It is frequently an expert presenting on their passion or app and showing teachers how to use the product rather than explaining the why and the purpose of the tech or tool for teaching within the classroom or online learning environment.”
4. 64% of respondents want pedagogical and or subject-specific focused professional development to help them teach online.

These findings are similar to those found by the National Foundation for Educational Research and RAND.

A Solution To The Problem

So where can educators find online pedagogy focused professional development?

We partnered with Adobe, Clickview, iCivics, and Participate to create Teaching Online Masterclass (TOM). A free online professional development resource for teachers making the leap into remote teaching and learning.

Teaching online is about more than just technology. Of course, it’s important to know your Zooms from your Google Classrooms, but the way educators plan their lessons, manage their class, and engage with their students is different in the online world. So to help educators develop the skills they need to be effective online educators we created TOM.

Using video interviews from classroom educators, academics, and industry professionals, educators can learn how to start teaching online the right way.

Check out TOM here.

Teaching Online Masterclass Whitepaper

We've been working on something for a while; a whitepaper. Drawing on the themes from TOM, qualitative and quantitative interviews, and research on best practices in online teaching, we've created a resource that shows educators how to put theory into practice. Dr. James Nelson and Dr. Jennifer Roberts from Queen's University Belfast have helped us with this project which will be released on Monday, November 2nd.

Interested in finding out more about TOM? Check out the resources here.