Building a Research Agenda for Online Teacher Professional Development Models

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

In spite of an ongoing investment in developing online professional development, scant research is available on the effectiveness of these programs or how the underlying models could improve through sharing insights about design and implementation. Both professional development and distance/distributed learning would benefit from a collaboratively developed research agenda that contrasts current findings from exemplary projects, builds collective insights from these results, and proposes key themes and related methodologies for studying the evolution of effective online Teacher Professional Development (oTPD) models. With this grant, the Harvard's Graduate School of Education (HGSE) will host an invitational conference for exemplary oTPD projects to share insights and to develop such a research agenda. HGSE will organize a two-day, invitational research conferences of about one hundred participants, including scholars, practitioners, policymakers, funders and other stakeholders. The organizers will select roughly ten oTPD projects to prepare a position paper and present their work. The selection will be based on the following criteria: Each project will have a design and model based on theory and research, research or evaluation results, and a plan for scalability and sustainability; The suite of projects will span a range of oTPD content, a range of audiences and a range of pedagogies.