“SMALL” MOOCS AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMS

School teachers have little time to participate in teacher training programs and if they do lessons have to be reorganised or do not take place at all. Due to this short-comings, online teacher training programs seem to be an appropriate instrument to overcome these problems. In the context of MOOCs a new instrument arose which offers o opportunity to over online courses and as well address a large group of participants. But do these only courses really work for teacher training programs?
The university of Frankfurt started the first German MOOC in 2011, covering the “Future of learning”, followed by a second MOOC in 2012, “Trends in E-Teaching”.

Both MOOCs were offered in German in order to address German speaking educators and also to address German educational issues. 2012 another MOOC was offered in cooperation with the state wide public radio station addressing many aspects of the so called media society. Although in the first two MOOCs, teachers were addressed, only the third one explicitly addressed teachers as one of the main target groups. Finally in 2014, another online course which explicitly addressed teachers as its main target group was run covering the usage of Web 2.0 Tools in teaching and learning. While in the first three MOOCs the acquisition of ICT competencies by teachers was rather a secondary effect due to the topics of the courses and the format delivered, the Web 2.0 course explicitly focussed on the acquisition of ICT competencies by teachers.

The paper will address the specific problems of teachers’ participation in mixed courses which address teachers and other educators as well. Also, it will present the results of the participation of teachers in the open courses 2012, which was run by the state wide radio station in cooperation with the University Frankfurt, and its presents the design and implementation of the ‘Web 2.0 course’ which can be rated as the most successful course in terms of teachers’ participation. Based on these results, some insights and conclusions can be given concerning the design of online courses as an instrument for teacher training programs as well as the course design and results of an online course for teachers which addresses the use of mobile applications and devices such as tablets in schools, which will be run in April 2015.