Abstract:

The Ministry of Education in Korea provides varied professional development programs for public school teachers, but they are mostly top-down, institution-centered, one-time offer courses, which seldom meet teachers’ needs and hardly guarantee improvement of the participant teachers’ instruction. To solve the repeated problems, this study intends to suggest a new reform model for teacher professional development by integrating a mobile-based open learning platform, SMART Teaching 3.0. SMART is meant to be self-directed, motivating, applicable, rich, and technology-supported in this project. The new teacher professional development model was constructed and elaborated for two years based on Design-Based Research (DBR) approach (Amiel and Reeve, 2008) in the cyclic process of four step principles:
1) analysis,
2) development,
3) testing and refinement, and
4) reflection.

First of all, the project started with an analysis of 258 Korean English teachers’ needs to identify the target instruction tasks they want to improve. Second, based on the needs analysis, the contents were created in the short video formats and sorted by four categories:
1) Teachers’ stories
2) Tips & Issues
3) Virtual class tour, and
4) Screen lectures.

All the participants shown in the videos are English teachers and students in their classrooms. The platform was developed with mobile friendly technologies such as ‘responsive web design (RWD).’ Third, the mobile-based learning platform was implemented to 149 English teachers for five months for its validation. Data were collected from various sources such as website statistics, comments, weekly journals and interviews to investigate whether this new model can reach the reforming educational goals of successfully operating the five key features (e.g. SMART), as well as of solving problems in the existing programs. During the testing period, it was reported that the mobile-based program enabled teachers to use the program without time and place constraints. Moreover, the participating teachers perceived self-selected contents motivating, although they still wanted update and expansion of the contents. Some of them immediately applied what they learned to their own classes. Meanwhile, the issue of sustainability of self-directed learning was raised in the process of implementation. As the last sequence of the DBR principles, this study refined the initial design and finally suggests a new model, school-based offline community of practice (CoP, Lave & Wenger, 1991) combined with SMART Teaching 3.0.

Keywords:

Teacher education program, teacher professional development, mobile learning, bottom-up, self-directed learning, open learning platform, design-based research.