Developing Capabilities for Local Educational Innovation and Improvement through Open Access Professional Learning

• In Event: Capacity Building, Collaboration, and Educator Pathways in a Global Context

Proposal

Introduction: Global policy discourse increasingly centers on supporting transformative change aimed at advancing educational access, quality, and equity. Such discourse has roots in the United Nations Strategic Development Goal 4, which seeks to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” It was amplified by the United Nations Transforming Education Summit in September 2022.

Calls for transformative change have emerged concurrent with new understandings of the need to develop local capabilities for innovation and improvement to complement reform activity at the national, provincial/territorial, and regional levels (Greany & Kamp, 2022). A problem, however, is that many countries lack the professional learning infrastructure needed to rapidly develop large numbers of local teachers and leaders as agents of transformative change.

The purpose of the proposed paper is to explore the use of a ubiquitous digital technology – massive open online courses – to support large-scale professional learning opportunities aimed at developing local capabilities for educational innovation and improvement.

Relevance: The proposed paper is responsive to the call to use the 2025 CIES Annual Conference to envision education in a digital society, with a specific focus on innovative approaches to teacher education and leader education.

Theory: The use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to develop local capabilities for educational innovation and improvement introduces a formidable instructional design challenge. On the one hand, the strength of MOOCs is their support for transfer-oriented pedagogies that are information/content-focused, instructor-driven, and tailored to individualized, self-paced learning (Blackmon & Major, 2017). On the other hand, developing teachers and leaders as change agents benefits from constructivist pedagogies that are more social, collaborative, and tailored to working collaboratively to co-construct new understandings and new capabilities (Siemens, 2005).

As such, the proposed paper explores the use of Self-Directed/Community-Supported Learning as an instructional design that integrates transfer-oriented and constructivist learning theories in ways that (a) leverage that advantages of asynchronous learning while (b) incorporating innovative opportunities for team-based collaborative practice (Authors, 2020).

Inquiry: The proposed paper is a case study of “Transforming Education in an Interconnected World”, an open access professional learning series developed by the EdHub for Community and Professional Learning at the University of Michigan. The Transforming Education series uses Self-Directed/Community-Supported Learning to introduce leading theory and research on local innovation and improvement to a global audience. The Transforming Education series was launched in Spring 2024 as a “2.0” version of an earlier professional learning series that had over 50K registrations from learners in over 160 countries.

Available at no cost on the Coursera platform, the Transforming Education series consists of four courses: (1) Series Orientation; (2) Envisioning Educational Transformation; (3) Reimagining Educational Innovation; and (4) Practicing Collaborative, Continuous Improvement. The series includes two sets of resources to support student engagement and success. The first is course-specific Study Guides designed to support learners both in engaging the online content and in leading local improvement activities. The second is a social media-based community group designed to support (a) collegial interactions among learners and (b) interactions between learners and educational researchers who support local innovation and improvement.

The proposed paper reports on an eight month inquiry conducted concurrent with the launch of the Transforming Education series. The inquiry sought to understand the relationship between (a) the design for Self-Directed/Community-Supported Learning as implemented on the Coursera platform, (b) the supplemental resources provided beyond the Coursera platform, and (c) learners’ levels of engagement in asynchronous and collegial learning opportunities.

The inquiry featured four sources of evidence: (1) artifacts and reflections generated via a team of fifteen University of Michigan graduate students who completed the first two courses of the Transforming Education series in the context of a campus-based seminar; (2) learners’ contributions and reflections on Coursera-based discussions; (3) learners’ engagement with the social media-based community group; and (4) field notes generated by a University of Michigan facilitator who monitors and supports all online course activities.

Findings: Our initial inquiry suggests a paradox in the design of large-scale, open access professional learning: The greater the support for learner engagement in collegial learning, the more that learners struggled to sustain deep engagement and participation. Whether “designed into” the Coursera platform, structured into companion Study Guides, or made available through the social-media based community group, leveraging support for collegial learning created additional work for learners and required additional time investments. As a consequence, the more that the online learning opportunities in the Transforming Education series mirror the social, collaborative work of leading local transformative change, the less likely it is that learners will fully engage those learning opportunities. The exception was a nucleus of highly motivated learners who took leadership in contributing to and drawing on social learning opportunities.

Contribution: Our inquiry suggests that developing capabilities for local educational innovation and improvement through open access professional learning would benefit from designing for differentiated levels of learner engagement, on the understanding that a majority of learners will engage in self-directed, asynchronous learning opportunities and that a minority of highly motivated learners will engaged in community-supported, collegial learning opportunities. Our inquiry also suggests that any efforts to leverage MOOCs as a ubiquitous digital technology would benefit from complementary, place-based professional learning opportunities. The implication is that developing local capabilities to respond to policy aspirations for transformative educational change will continue to be a long term proposition not easily mitigated by digital technologies.

References

Authors. (2020).

Blackmon, S. J., & Major, C. H. (2017). Wherefore art thou MOOC: Defining massive open online courses. Retrieved August 15, 2024, from https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/article/view/1272.

Greany, T. & Kamp, A. (2020). Leading educational networks: Theory, policy, and practice. Bloomsbury Academic.

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology on Distance Learning, 2(1). http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm

Authors

• Donald Peurach, University of Michigan

• Aysha Jerald