What Kind of Teacher Takes a Professional Development Massive Open Online Course?

• In Event: 14.036 - Massive Open Online Course Students in Context: Equity, Motivation, and Performance

Abstract

This paper analyzes a set of MOOCs for American teachers in elementary and secondary schools. They focus on building skills for the classroom that would prepare students, especially English Language Learners, for the new, highly language-intensive Common Core State Standards tests.
When new professional development opportunities like this are freely offered through MOOCs, who is willing and able to take advantage of them? Which student populations are most likely to have their teachers take these courses? Answering these questions can help keep our eye on equity and potentially inform public policy.

This paper offers descriptive statistical analysis speaking to who takes these courses, using pre-survey and user data generated within these courses. The data speak to geography, limited demographic attributes, technology access, and many questions about teachers’ professional careers. At what kind of schools do they work, what educator roles do they hold (including, e.g., teacher in training or district administrator), in what content area do they work, and how many years’ experience do they have? Questions also concerned the participants’ students, particularly about whether English Language Learner status and native languages. Further, questions about the intersection of teaching and MOOC-taking are asked: how many colleagues are enrolling in the course, have they received a degree involving online instruction, and have teachers taken previous courses on this topic?

I use regression and factor analysis relate these learner traits to each other and to course completion. I analyze separately by subgroups of students with additional incentives to complete the course: some students pay for the course to facilitate receiving professional development credit, and others are enrolled with colleagues, in a district that built it into a hybrid program. I estimate bounds on the estimates, modeling different levels of attrition and self-selection bias.

Among the findings are that more experienced teachers are less likely to enroll in this course, but those who do have higher rates of completion than their younger colleagues. Not surprisingly, participants who enroll through their school district tend to have different traits than the other participants. In this course, geared toward better supporting language use for all students, almost three quarters of the U.S.-based participants currently work with English Language Learners, and teachers of ELLs were almost four times more likely than other participants to complete the course.

MOOCs for teacher professional development offer many opportunities for specialized training to reach large numbers of teachers at once. The evidence from this class suggests that teachers across the spectrum enroll in and can successfully complete these courses. I close by considering the training teachers might have chosen instead of this MOOC; what are the normative implications of widely sharing a free option for teacher professional development, and how might this change education in the long term?

Author

• Betsy Anne Williams, Stanford University