This section describes some of our guiding principles about professional development in general, different types of online professional development, the approach we have taken, and considerations for integrating online workshops into an overall program of professional development.

3.1 Principles of Effective Professional Development

Effective online professional development (OPD) must adhere to principles that underlie all effective professional development, and also take advantage of the particular strengths of the online medium. We must therefore consider the general question: What are the characteristics of effective professional development for educators, no matter what the medium of delivery?

Key principles of effective professional development for educators have been articulated in the work of Joyce and Showers, 1995; Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love and Stiles, 1998; Renyi, 1996; Sparks and Hirsch, 1997, and other relevant research. These principles include the following:

• Focus on improving classroom practices as a means of increasing student achievement.

 
• Provide a balance of academic content, the study of curriculum and instructional strategies, and the process of school improvement.

 
• Engage teachers actively in their own development, rather than "transmitting" knowledge and skills "to" them.

 
• Relate professional development activities to participants’ work, using classroom experiments and action research as integral parts of training workshops.

 
• Provide sufficient time for inquiry, reflection, and mentoring on an ongoing basis.

 
• Support the development of collaborative teams and collegial communities of learners, to help educators be more effective in their roles.

 
• Foster a deepening of subject-matter knowledge, a greater understanding of the learning process, and a greater appreciation of students’ needs.

 

3.2 Different Types of Online Professional Development (OPD)

The phrase "online professional development" is applied to many different types of learning experiences, reflecting many different learning goals and approaches to teaching via the online medium. One useful way to categorize these is based upon the nature of the communications and interactions that take place. Within this framework, some variants of OPD include the following:

• Broadcast approaches in which the primary interactions are one-way, from a "presenter" or "teacher" to the members of an "audience" or "class". The web-broadcasting of lectures, which can be done in either real time or asynchronously with full video and audio, is a primary example. In some cases, opportunities for questions are provided following the broadcast, but the primary form of communication is one-way, not interactive.

 
• Self-paced, independent study courses, in which a learner interacts with content provided by the instructor, without any interactions with other students and with little, if any, interaction with the instructor. In many examples of this type of online learning, the instructor provides feedback to students only on papers or projects required to obtain credit. Therefore, the primary form of interaction is between the learner and the materials, with perhaps some one-to-one communications between the instructor and each student.

 
• College lecture course models, that often combine the first two types of interactions: students receive lectures and materials from the instructor. Typically, these add some additional but limited means of communication, such as email with the instructor or online office hours within a synchronous or "chat" environment.

 
• Tutorial models in which there are active and ongoing interactions between each student and the instructor.

 
• Learning community models, in which emphasis is placed on interactions among all the participants and the instructors or "facilitators", which is the term often used within this model. Here, many-to-many interactions play a central role, generally through an asynchronous threaded discussion tool, but in some cases, through an email listserve. Synchronous "chats" may sometimes be used for specific purposes, such as group brainstorming, or to support participants during an exploration activity.

 

Our approach falls within the learning community model, as we believe that this approach is most appropriate for providing learning opportunities for teachers and administrators in which the goal is both to inform and to help them improve their professional practices. We believe that the general principles of effective professional development, summarized in Section 3.1, require a learning community approach to actively engage participants in their own learning, to enable educators to collaborate and support each other, to connect directly to participants’ work, and to provide a supportive context for inquiry, reflection, and mentoring.

3.3 Potential Advantages of the Learning Community Approach to OPD

The learning community approach to OPD has a number of important properties that are compatible with principles of effective professional development, and that make it a potentially valuable addition to the set of available professional development methods. These include the following, which are discussed in more detail in Green, 1998; Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, and Turoff, 1995; Kleiman, 1998; Tinker and Haavind, 1997; and Zorfass, Remz & Ethier, 1998.

• Convenience. Educators can participate in OPD activities from anyplace that a computer and Internet access are available, so the need for travel is eliminated. When asynchronous exchanges are the primary means of interactions, participants can work on their own schedules, participating anytime day or night.

 
• Cost effectiveness. Since travel and meeting space costs are eliminated, and the need for release time and substitutes is reduced, OPD can be cost effective for participants and school districts. However, we also note that there are many factors to consider, such as the cost of staff time involved in developing and facilitating OPD workshops, the technology infrastructure to run them, technical support, and computer and web-access for participants. So whether OPD is cost effective as compared to face-to-face workshops depends upon many factors, such as what distance participants would travel, what technology is already available and can be employed without extra cost, whether meeting space would be available at no cost, and so on.

 
• Ongoing connections to participants’ practice. An online workshop can be scheduled to cover several weeks, which provides the opportunity to make meaningful connections to participants’ classroom or administrative practices. An online workshop can mix off-line activities, such as classroom observations or implementing new lesson plans, with online research, reflection, and discussion. Participants can share their thoughts, experiences, and ideas with each other in a timely manner, in response to their ongoing classroom or administrative practices.

 
• Interactions with colleagues and mentors not available locally. OPD enables educators with common interests and needs to share ideas, expertise, and resources at a distance. OPD also makes it possible to involve researchers, students, and others who can provide useful perspectives but would not be available for local meetings.

 
• Reflective discussions. Since participants and instructors can take time to respond to each other’s questions and ideas, responses in asynchronous online discussions are often more reflective and more carefully phrased than those in face-to-face classes. The fact that all prior discussions can be reviewed at any time contributes to making online discussions more reflective.

 
• Open social dynamic. Since the "discussion space" is not time limited as it is in face-to-face meetings, each participant can contribute as much as he or she desires without interrupting or limiting the time available to others. Furthermore, the lack of physical presence can lead to more focus on the content of people’s contributions, and less on participants’ physical appearance, status, race, gender, age, manner of speech, or other personal attributes.

 
• Engages educators in using new technologies. OPD provides opportunities for educators to experience using technology as learners, enabling them to explore ways that they may later use technology with their own students.

 
• Multiple modes for learning. OPD can make use of a variety of current and emerging Internet technologies to promote multiple modes of learning, such as reflective interactions, self-paced explorations, and collaborative work. For example, participants can engage in both synchronous ("same-time") and asynchronous ("anytime") interactions, gather resources of all types available on the web, share audio and video materials, use simulations and other online interactive software, and even see and hear each other using two-way audio and video.

 
• Archives of activities and discussions. Since a record of discussions is automatically accumulated as the course proceeds, and in well-designed courses summaries of each session are made available, participants do not have to rely on memory and notes to recall what others said previously. This can provide opportunities for participants to better build upon prior discussions, and it enables those who did not participate to later benefit from the workshop archive. It also provides a valuable resource for formative research to improve the workshop design.

 

3.4 Integrating OPD Workshops into an Overall Professional Development Program

We believe that the impact of OPD workshops is maximized when they are thoughtfully integrated into an overall program of professional development to complement and enhance other means of professional development. Therefore, a first step in planning is to decide what roles OPD workshops will play and how they will relate to other professional development activities. In fact, participants in our focus groups have noted that not only is it important to define the role of OPD, but it is also crucial to know how to go about defining its role: for example, how to educate the relevant stakeholders about OPD, how to decide what areas to address first with OPD, etc.

Some districts may be tempted to simply offer online versions of their existing professional development activities, with the idea that these will reach teachers who are too busy or who for other reasons do not attend the traditional offerings. However, it is important to consider what types of activities will work well online, and what types should remain face-to-face. While we do not yet have extensive experience with alternative approaches to this decision, some elements to consider are described below. These elements should be considered in conjunction with the potential advantages of OPD described in Section 3.3.

• Technology skill development, particularly at the introductory level, is better accomplished via hands-on in-person workshops, in which immediate assistance is available, rather than via OPD workshops. For example, learning how to use a web browser, search engine, email, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and other plug-ins such as QuickTime or Shockwave, that might be required prerequisites for some OPD workshops, are best learned through local face-to-face workshops or self-paced explorations with help available. The same is true for learning particular software packages.

 
• Many people are far more comfortable communicating online with people whom they already know through in-person interactions. Therefore, combining an online workshop with an initial, midpoint, and final meeting of the participants can provide a good blend of the advantages of both in-person and online communications. Or if the entire group of participants cannot gather in one place, small "study groups" of those who can meet together can provide a similar blend.

 
• Some types of activities, such as brainstorming sessions, collaborative concept mapping or lesson design, and other activities that involve the rapid cooperative building of ideas or teamwork are more effective in face-to-face meetings than in online interactions. While the use of sophisticated technologies can make some of this possible online, so far it remains difficult to achieve the same level of productive energy for these types of tasks that can be generated face-to-face. Off-line collaborative team meetings can be combined with online reflective discussions to produce an effective professional development experience.

 
• OPD should not be considered a "panacea" that can simply replace other forms of professional development for all educators. In addition to considering the types of activities that are best suited for the online medium, it is also important to keep in mind that different individuals will have different levels of comfort in the online environment. While a certain amount of trepidation and inexperience can be overcome, for some educators, text-based, asynchronous online discussions are not a comfortable or effective form of communication, and so other professional development activities need to continue to be available.

 
• Coaching and mentoring programs, in which the coaches and mentors visit to observe practitioners in action and then discuss their observations, cannot be replaced by online interactions (although some forms of coaching and mentoring can be effective online).

 
• Inspiring speakers, videos of model classroom practices, graduate school courses, curriculum planning teams, and other forms of professional development can each contribute important elements to an overall program and provide the right opportunities for specific educators.