Online Professional Development - concern about the standards of distance education

School Administrator, Oct, 2001 by Joan Richardson

As staff training goes electronic, some raise concerns about the loss of face-to-face contact

Is this your image of online staff development? A teacher sits alone at a computer in the family room at home quietly clicking from one screen to the next, concentrating on colorful lessons that flash before her eyes. She types in responses to questions but talks to no one about what she's learning. When she's finished her online course, she fills out the required in-service paperwork, gets her in-service credits and moves on.

Or is this your image of online staff development? Using online conferencing software, a teacher is connected to others who teach the same subject. They develop lesson plans keyed to newly introduced state standards in mathematics. They edit each others' lessons and, after they use the lessons with students, they return to an online discussion group to share their experiences with each other.

In today's rapidly expanding world of online learning, both examples are realistic. Online staff development offers enormous opportunities to customize learning around individual teacher needs and to make learning convenient for teachers. Learning can be "just in time," when teachers need it most. Online training can allow teachers to learn basic skills with confidentiality or it can open doors to allow teachers to network with colleagues across their school districts or the country.

But online learning also has the potential to accelerate the worst parts of staff development--the fragmentation and the isolation--without any monitoring of the rigor of the work that teachers are doing, says Joellen Killion, director of special projects for the National Staff Development Council and co-author of a newly released set of technology standards, "E-Learning for Educators: Implementing the Standards for Staff Development" (www.nsdc.org/standards_tech.html).

"I fear that people will be looking only at what the individual wants and not at schoolwide needs. We could have a high school of 125 teachers each doing their own thing and not working together to move the whole school in the same direction," she says.

Dennis Sparks, executive director of the National Staff Development Council, worries that electronic learning may "provide a centrifugal force that moves teachers away from daily collaboration with colleagues in professional learning communities within their schools."

He adds: "It's essential, from my point of view, that a significant portion of teachers' professional learning occur in school each day as teachers together plan lessons, critique student work and examine various data from their school. To the extent that electronic learning aids these core team-based functions, it may well serve schools and students. To the extent that it adds to incoherence and fragmentation of effort, it contributes to the squandering of a precious resource--teachers' professional knowledge and skill."

But if the trend in education follows that in business, then technology-based training, or e-learning as it's called in the corporate sector, can be expected to rise markedly. No education-specific statistics are available, but 29 percent of all training was delivered online in 2000, according to Training magazine's annual industry report. Merrill Lynch projects that e-learning will grow to become a $25 billion business by 2003, up from $3.5 billion in 2001.

Says Bobb Darnell, director of staff support in Arlington Heights School District 214 in suburban Chicago: "This is a matter of when, nor if, this is going to happen. This is going to happen."

Face to Face

Educators are grappling with many issues related to online learning. One concern that cuts deep on both sides is whether online learning can be as effective as face-to-face learning.

"We seem to believe that face-to-face learning, where the teacher can interact face-to-face with an instructor, is better," Darnell says. "We seem to believe that face-to-face allows the flexibility of responding in the moment and of being more responsive to what the learner needs."

During the development of NSDC's online standards, participants made a running joke of whether certain individuals were "face-to-face bigots," educators who simply didn't believe that online learning could ever equal learning in a traditional classroom.

Killion, who formerly ran staff development programs in the Adams 12 Five Star School District near Denver, laughs as she tells this story. "I am a face-to-face bigot. I know what I like. I know that dialogue is really important and it's really hard to dialogue online. You have to structure interaction between participants and that makes it sort of unnatural," she says. "When you sit down to type a message in a chat room or a threaded conversation, you edit yourself. You edit your choice of words and generally just take more care in the language that you use."

So while participants may be having an online discussion, they may not be getting across the same level of detail or passion as they would during a face-to-face meeting.