Surf the Wave of the Future!

Internet-based courses are rapidly expanding professional development opportunities for teachers

If the very thought of taking a night course after a hard day in the classroom makes your feet hurt, there's good news: Now you can move up your district's salary scale in your fuzzy bunny slippers and your comfiest bathrobe--wherever or whenever you have access to the World Wide Web.

That's what appealed to Carol Pike about taking a professional development course through Classroom Connect's Connected University. "I have no time to go anywhere," says Pike, a kindergarten teaching assistant at Paul Elementary School, in Wakefield, New Hampshire. "I have two boys, so it would be difficult to take a course away from home."

For science and language arts teacher Pam Byrd, the class she took through WebEd, another on-line course provider, was a lifesaver. Living in rural Tabor City, North Carolina, she's an hour and a half away from the nearest college. But WebEd allowed her to earn graduate credits at her convenience. "If something happens--if the children need me--I can stop whatever I'm doing and log out." Both women's experiences are indicative of the mushrooming trend toward on-line professional development that looks to revolutionize the way teachers learn. With more and more states mandating continuing education for teachers, and teachers facing requirements to teach to new, more rigorous standards, there has been in the past few years a marked increase in the demand for teacher training. When this demand meets increased access to computers and the Internet in schools and in homes, it seems suddenly clear that distance learning for teachers is the wave of the future.

Expanding Content

Just a few years ago, courses like the ones Carol Pike and Pam Byrd took were practically unknown. Today, a small but growing number of organizations offer hundreds of classes enabling teachers to fulfill state requirements, accumulate C.E.U.s (continuing education units) or P.D.P.s (professional development points), or, through affiliations with universities and often for an extra fee, earn graduate credit. (For a selected list of providers, see the box on page 68.) Often schools, districts, or entire states work out agreements with these providers so that teachers can take them at no charge.

When on-line professional development courses first became available, they tended to deal exclusively with technology-related topics such as using e-mail and message boards, designing Web pages, or teaching with the Internet. Today, providers are expanding their course offerings to touch on just about every aspect of teaching. Whether you need to meet your state's basic requirements for computer instruction or you want to to help students in your math class become better readers, there's a course on the Web for you.

Connected University's approximately 45 courses, for example, cover all aspects of using technology in the classroom, but also include such topics as "Collaborating with Parents" and "Creative Assessment Strategies." There's also a popular new series of courses offered in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History, including "The Study of Spiders," "What Ever Happened to the Woolly Mammoth?" and "Diversity of Fishes," each of which has a museum scientist participating in the on-line discussion.

Another major provider of Web-based courses, T.H.E. (Technology Horizons in Education) Institute, has been running five core technology classes for the last two years and just expanded its repertoire to include 16 additional courses for teachers and four for administrators, as well as four other technology courses for graduate credit. And WebEd's approximately 200 courses in 25 categories offer something for everyone in the school building, from art to English to physical education to music to vocational education. There are even courses for guidance counselors, school nurses, and media specialists.

Flexible Learning

Web-based professional development courses are usually designed by content experts or college professors, and most course providers use instructors or "moderators," usually experienced classroom teachers with higher degrees. These instructors, who generally act as facilitators, respond to comments and questions on message boards and in discussion groups; in larger classes there are even teaching assistants to help answer questions. (WebEd's classes, which are completely automated, are the exception.)

Typically, a student starts a course by reading text and following instructions on the Web site. There will be links to follow, practice quizzes to take, and open-ended questions to which students may be asked to post answers on an Internet message board. In courses that are moderated, instructors will answer students' questions or respond to comments posted on the message boards, or students and instructors can communicate via e-mail.

Some classes are completely self-paced, like those of WebEd and T.H.E. Institute. In these, students can begin whenever they want, finish whenever they want, and proceed at whatever pace they please. Others, like those of Classroom Connect's Connected University or Sky-Light Professional Development, have "cohorts" or limited groups of students who start and finish on specific dates, turn in weekly assignments and a final project, and are graded on class participation (usually in threaded discussions on message boards).

All of these companies say they have a commitment to what is called "asynchronous learning," or the ability to take classes whenever it's best for the user. But the differences in approach point up the tension between two conflicting philosophies behind Web-based courses. On the one hand, there's the benefit of interacting and learning with one's virtual classmates. On the other hand, there is the advantage of complete flexibility and freedom for the individual student to learn at will. "The anytime-anywhere promise of on-line learning is important," says John Lent, vice president of Scholastic's Learning Ventures, whose professional development site will launch in Spring 2001. "While interaction between students and instructors is important, we think it's to some degree limiting."

Connected University classes involve a community of learners in regularly scheduled six-week classes. Each class, which has atleast 25 students, a guide, and a T.A., requires weekly assignments, discussions on message boards, and a final project. Students also have the option of registering as independent learners, in which case they are required only to complete the final project, not the assignments or the discussion.

Amy Fiske, who teaches third and fourth grade at Amherst Street Elementary School, in Nashua, New Hampshire, was surprised by the amount of communication she had with her instructors in her six-week Web-page design class at CU. "The instructors are great at e-mailing back and forth," says Fiske. "They get you to reflect on what you've done ... constantly making you think. It's definitely not static: The conversation is dynamic and it's engaging you.

Like Connected University, Skylight Professional Development offers highly interactive classes that operate on a schedule--either eight or 16 weeks--and class size is limited to 20. There are weekly assignments, a final project, and class discussion--participation counts for 1/4 of the grade. But in addition to the Web content, SkyLight's classes also have a video and textbook component. Participants read the textbook assignment, view a video that models and demonstrates the classroom skills being taught, and then discuss what they've seen on threaded discussion boards.

T.H.E. Institute, an offshoot of T.H.E. Journal which covers technology in education, has decided not to schedule its courses in a set timeframe. "Different people learn at different rates and have different learning styles," says Geoff Fletcher, the institute's executive vice president. "We don't want to force the teachers to all go through at the same rate." Like those of CU and SkyLight, T.H.E. Institute's classes have assignments and final projects, and most have moderators. Still, by using threaded discussion groups, says Fletcher, students can go through the course on their own schedule, and still learn from each other. Moderators communicate with students by e-mail, pointing them to relevant postings of previous students.

Christine Wolf, a technology teacher from Chappaqua, New York, liked the balance between independence and interdependence she found in the class she took through T.H.E. Institute last spring. "It's almost like an independent study, only you're guided," says Wolf. "When I got stuck a couple of times I went back and read the discussion of students who had taken the course and read the comments of the moderator."

Probably the most asynchronous of all is WebEd. All the courses are self-paced, self-guided, and broken into 10 one-hour lessons that automatically provide feedback to the student, with no moderator or instructor. "You don't have to wait for a teacher on the other end to get in touch with you," says WebEd's publisher, Tim Anderson. "The software does all the work." For example, after reading a passage, a student will come across a series of questions with a blank text field for answers. After typing in a response, the student can click on "answer" to check her work. Meanwhile, the software keeps track of how long each student works and what information she downloads.

Rapid Growth

Pulled along in the wake of that cultural tidal wave called the Internet, Web-based professional development for teachers is growing and shifting as rapidly as the modern technology landscape itself. This means that just a few months from now, your on-line options for professional growth will be even richer and more varied than they are today.

The education portal BigChalk.com, for example, has plans for the future that will take the company beyond offering its own professional development content to distributing courses created by other companies. "We refer to ourselves as being like the cable networks," says Dr. Barbara Kurshan, BigChalk's executive vice president and chief education officer. "We do some of our own programming, but we also provide channels for others' programming." One of these "channels" will offer a "make-your-own-professional-development-course" option, where district curriculum specialists, teacher trainers, or even individual teachers can put their own courses online, either for their own faculty or for teachers across the country, at no charge.

BigChalk is also betting that teachers will go for a concept they call "Just In Time Learning." Subscribers will have 24-hour, 7-day-a-week access to an on-line database of mini-lessons--the kind you might want to pull up the night before you teach something you've never taught before.

With this sort of convenience, flexibility, and variety rapidly becoming widely available to teachers who want to grow professionally, the days of those tedious in-service workshops may well be numbered. Fuzzy bunny slippers, on the other hand, aren't going anywhere.

Brian Hanson-Harding teaches English in Old Tappan, New Jersey. His most recent article for Instructor was "The Charter Challenge" (March, 2000).

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