Providing Online PD
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Subject:[ProfessionalDevelopment] David R's Six Questions / # 3 and 6
From:George Kohout gkohout at hcc.mass.edu
Date:Wed Feb 1 15:11:27 EST 2006
David ....
Thanks for providing a little framework for our discussion via
your questions. Here's a response to a few of them and I look
forward to other guests chiming in.
- 3. Do you offer online PD? Do you plan to? Why or why not? what do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of professional development?
SABES in Massachusetts has offered a number of PD activities
online in the past six years on the topics on staff supervision, language acquisition, ESOL writing, distance learning programming for ABE
students, teaching for diversity and adult development.
These courses have included a F2F (face to face) component (up to
three meetings) in order to build a sense of community for participants.
We commonly refer to these as 'hybrid" on-line courses. We are also
in the process of developing a course on fundamentals of assessment
that will be entirely online.
SABES is curently developing a five-year vision and a plan for our PD
activities for FY07 - 08. David Rosen is working on this plan with
a committee of SABES staff. This planning and exploration includes
other assets of the medium e.g. access to online documents, CD-rom
packages and video.
The main advantages to on-line PD is that it offers greater access to
information and PD activities for those ABE practitioners who have
scheduling or travel constraints. Given the universal heavy work loads
of practitioners and their limited hours for PD anything we can do to
provide training that meets their needs and encourages participation
is a positive step. We are also exploring other assets of the medium,
e.g. access to online documents and video.
The significant disadvantages to on-line PD in our experience can be the cost of designing and supporting new offerings, the loss of valuable F2F sharing among peers and for participants who have not grown up with technology a hesitancy to embrace the positive aspects of this delivery method.
