Abstract:

In the state of Texas, USA, there are 20 education service centers that provide professional development opportunities to approximately 700,000 teachers, administrators and school support personnel. With the increase in the number of federally required compliance courses and state mandated training it has become necessary to find different avenues to deliver instruction. Transferring teacher’s professional development courses from face to face classrooms to online environments has recently become an evolving trend in Texas k-12 education. Professional development consultants are highly encouraged to transfer many of their training sessions online, however little or no guidance on what constitutes an effective online course is provided to them. As the result, the consultants design courses that draw much criticism from the school districts and state educational agencies due to the lack of quality and effectiveness. In order to help instructors transition from face to face to online courses we were asked to develop an effective, but short, training module that allows teachers to design and evaluate successful online courses. In order to develop a training module for the teachers we started with a broader scope of understanding the common issues among already designed courses. The analysis of current issues is a necessary step in the overall development process since according to Kidder (2015) “there is no exact right or wrong answer or solution [to how train faculty on online teaching]; and the process of exploring the problem is likely to significantly transform the problem through the iterative design stages and processes” (p.79). Through the process of analyzing more than 70 online courses designed by professional development consultants we found that the majority of classes scored very low on both instructional design and andragogical principles. In this article we discuss our findings, address the need to train teachers on course interactivity, assessment, feedback and accessibility as well as provide the outline for the training course in development and suggest ideas for its implementation and further research.

References:
[1] Kidder, L. C. (2015). The Multifaceted Endeavor of Online Teaching: The Need for a New Lens. In The Design of Learning Experience (pp. 77-91). Springer International Publishing.

Keywords:

Instructional Design, MOOCS, Andragogy, Professional Development, Online Teaching, Online Instructor Training.