What does it take to maintain large-scale online professional development? What role does technology, content, course design, online instructor training and professional development, quality assurance, and evaluation in large-scale online professional development? In this session presenters will share lessons learned from an eight-year long large-scale statewide online professional development project.
How do you design, implement, and sustain a large-scale online professional development project? What does it take to maintain large-scale online professional development? What role does technology, content, course design, online instructor training and professional development, quality assurance, and evaluation in large-scale online professional development? In this session presenters will share lessons learned from an eight-year long large-scale statewide online professional development project.
The Florida Online Reading Professional Development (FOR-PD), Florida's first large-scale statewide online professional development project, has trained over 800 online instructors and has serviced over 43,000 teachers in the state of Florida since 2002. As part of this project, FOR-PD employs an average of 65 online instructors per semester to facilitate the 14-week long FOR-PD course.
In this session presenters will describe their model for large-scale fully online professional development and will present data and lessons learned on the following: a) issues associated with instructional design—how do you develop a comprehensive and high stakes course fully online with participants who are developing their knowledge of what online learning entails; b) how to you select, train, and maintain effective online facilitation of many courses per semester with online instructors who are content experts but technology novices?; c) challenges associated with Learning Management System choices; d) a model for managing and monitoring participant learning; e) a system for ongoing formative and summative evaluation; and, f) a model for maintaining a professional virtual learning community. Finally, presenters will share results from various studies on the impact of this project on participant learning and will conclude by discussing challenges and possibilities that still inherent to large-scale online professional development.
