Abstract:

There is a variety of learning platforms and online learning tools designed with professional development in mind but they are not always directly linked with professionals’ everyday working life. The paper explores the use of specific learning platforms and tools within the professional development of educators and the extent they align with work-integrated learning principles. The reflections come from several EU and charity-funded international collaboration projects that utilized specifically designed learning platforms for professional development and then Toolkits around those platforms (such as Moodle, Notion or similar) as a knowledge exchange output. Those learning platforms and educational resources work well to support individual and co-created learning within a project/initiative but often lose their utility after the international professional development project has finished. Similarly, there are questions around the usability of such development tools, how they can be scaled up and be of use to ever-changing educators’ contexts. There is an issue with the level of integration of such learning professional development-driven tools with people’s everyday work life and flow. There are pros and cons with learning platforms as they might be better designed with learning in mind as opposed to everyday work applications which could be rigid or bureaucratic. But having other barriers such as another log-in name, having to go somewhere else, or download another application to engage in learning might practically and conceptually distance someone from applying it in their regular work. Furthermore, how best to organise the resources and share learning processes to be of use to other individuals and institutions with varying work contexts becomes an important consideration. Otherwise, we face the reality of producing relevant but unused ‘Toolkits’ that fail to be fully integrated with work. The paper will explore perspectives of professional development learning tools and the extent they could be brought closer to work life, proposing steps forward to achieve learning-work integration.

Keywords:

Professional development, learning platforms, toolkits, work-integrated learning.