Teachers reflecting and making changes: Massive courses and small but significant steps

• In Event: How teachers learn—making teacher professional development through education technology effective

Proposal

How can teacher training practices informed by a constructivist framework and structured by the experiential learning cycle be adapted into a massive open online course (MOOC)? How can the participants in such a MOOC get the kind of feedback, exchange of ideas, and motivation that they need in order to reflect deeply on their teaching practice and make changes in their teaching practice? It becomes especially challenging to reach these outcomes when making MOOCs available world-wide and targeting teachers in developing countries, given the impossibility of knowing the profile of the participants ahead of time—their language proficiency, level of education, access to internet, etc. (Shah, 2016)--and that MOOC participation requires a greater level of learner autonomy and digital literacy than other online learning experiences (Godwin-Jones, 2014).

The presenter will share data and lessons learned from leading the design on three MOOCs for teachers in developing country contexts that have reached 55,000 participants, with a completion rate at over 40%. Two MOOCs focused on content-based instruction and critical thinking, developed as part of the the Department of State global American English E-Teacher program. The third aimed at improving literacy instruction in the early grades, created through a partnership between World Learning and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a grant from the Project Impact Enhancement Fund 2018-19 of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Guided by a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach, and using a system to iteratively check task design and instruction prompts for several types of learners, the developers found that the following practices for MOOC design can lead to training that improves teaching practices: 1) Proactive scaffolding; 2) designing self-grading quizzes with questions and feedback that encourage critical thinking (DuBois, Krasny, & Russ 2019); 3) training participants in recognizing the characteristics of an excellent answer, a probing question, and depth of reflection (McBride, 2010); 4) making the course mobile friendly (Mentor, 2019); and 5) encouraging and describing small steps towards change that the teachers regards as feasible and intriguing (Guskey, 2002) and are likely to get them interacting with a peer face-to-face.

DuBois, B., Krasny, M. & A. Russ. (2019). Online professional development for environmental educators: strategies to foster critical thinking and social interactions. Environmental Education Research, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2018.1564247.

Godwin-Jones, R. (2014.) Global reach and local practice: The promise of MOOCs. Language, Learning and Technology 18(3):5-15·

Guskey, T. (2002). Professional development and teacher change. Teach. Theory and Pract. 8(3), 381-391.

McBride, K. (2010). Reciprocity in service learning: Intercultural competence through SLA studies. Selected Proceedings from the International Conference on the Development and Assessment of Intercultural Competence, 235–261.

Mentor, D. (2019). Electronic and Mobile Learning for Workforce Development. Information Science Reference

Shah, N. (2015). Of heathens, perverts and stalkers: The imagined learners in MOOCs. The Europa World of Learning 2016. Oxford: Routledge, 22-25.

Author

• Kara Angela McBride, World Learning, Inc.