SITE Blog

As a late response to Gerald Knezek (June 23rd, 2008) regarding online teacher education,

I think that is is being done properly, at least in a way that attends to access issues more effectively and offers more flexibility than many onsite courses. For those needing structure synchronous online courses (web-based videoconferencing) can provide that. The question becomes what is it that a campus-based course can uniquely offer? And my responses are the following:

- drama, that is, good onsite sociocognitive and compelling events (courses, seminars, and so on…)! But how many of our educational situations fall into this category?

-participation, that is, participation to a community of reflective individuals on teaching and learning. But are we really providing that except to a few that we hire as teaching and research assistants?

Preservice teachers taking campus-based (I mean hybrid courses as online activities have become a must) or online courses could join a teacher community of practice that relate to what they are studying but these are still rare.

When it comes to teacher professional development, we know from research that site-based PD along with a local professional learning community are worth designing. Such a community needs boundary spanners, and they are likely the ones to be effective in bringing back to their local professional community what they would have learned in an online course.

Here I am aware that I put in the shadow all those teachers wanting to improve as individual teachers and are intrinsically and/or extrinsically motivated. I think they constitute the main chunk of those taking professional online courses.

Comments Off