Multi-State Online Professional Development ToolKit

Changing professional development and meeting teacher needs

MOPD - A Model for Online Professional Development

Course Development

This section of the ToolKit provides information about what constitutes quality online courses including instruction, design, technical and management topics and issues. This page, like all of the other ToolKit pages, provides easy access to documents, Web sites and other materials that contain up-to-date and reliable information to assist in planning and developing online courses.

An Investigation of "Try Science" Studied On-line and Face-to-face, Executive Summary by Wynne Harlen and Craig Altobello
http://www.terc.edu/UPLOADED/DOCUMENTS/TryScience_ExecSum.pdf
“The research was set up to study the extent to which the on-line course 'Try Science' achieved its objectives compared with an on-campus course with the same content and objectives. The difference between the two courses unavoidably extended beyond the mode of delivery because of the different structures of the asynchronous on-line course, where activities could be carried out at a time chosen by the participants, and the on-campus course, having the normal pattern of weekly three-hour face-to-face meetings.”

Course Development by Rebby Carey, Research Associate, Education Development Center, Center for Online Professional Education
CourseDevelopment-Carey.pdf
This document contains a number of links to important sources of information on developing a course to be taught online. This is used as part of the EDC Course Development seminar.

Designing and Implementing Online Professional Development Workshops, EDC Center for Online Professional Education, Glenn Kleiman, Terry Dash, Denise Ethier, Kirsten Johnson, Susan Metrick, and Barbara Treacy.
http://www.edtechleaders.org/Resources/opd_report/opddesign.pdf
This report provides useful information for those who are planning to incorporate online learning into professional development programs and for those who will design and implement online professional development activities. The Center for Online Professional Education is continuing to explore this new medium for teaching and learning, as are many others. Both the knowledge of the field and the available technologies will continue to advance rapidly. Therefore, this should be read as a status report of ongoing investigations by one of a number of groups exploring this field, rather than as a final statement on any aspect of online professional development.

Developing Online Courses: A Human - Centered Approach (PDF) by Rovy Branon, Brian Beatty, Jack Wilson, Indiana University and Option Six, Inc.
Developing_Online_Courses.pdf
“Designing and building quality distance education is a challenge facing many organizations. Option Six is an independent company building customized e-learning solutions. Over the last two years, the instructional designers and user experience analysts at Option Six worked to help develop a four-stage process for evaluating e-learning courses. The process is built around Donald Norman's (2000) definition of human-centered design. This paper describes the process used by Option Six and outlines the benefits and challenge of human-centered design for distance education.”

EdTech Leaders Online: Building local capacity in educational technology
http://www.edtechleaders.org/action/story.htm 
This article, which was published in the Winter 2001 issue of Mosaic: An EDC Report Series, describes how several school districts in rural Louisiana have worked with EDC's Center for Online Professional Education and the EdTech Leaders Online model of professional development to build local capacity in educational technology. The story is part of a collection of articles in the issue that focus on the theme of "Communities Online: Building a Space for Professional Learning."

Elements of Successful Online Professional Development Programs
Barbara Treacy, Glenn Kleiman, and Kirsten Peterson (September 2002)
http://www.edtechleaders.org/Resources/articles/SuccessfulOPD.pdf
This article presents an overview of the key lessons learned in the EdTech Leaders Online (ETLO) program about how online learning can build capacity for technology integration and how it can help school districts, state departments of Education, regional service providers and teacher training programs meet the challenge of providing effective professional development for teachers and administrators. It includes a description of the learning community approach to online professional development and important lessons learned through the implementation of this approach in school districts throughout the country. One central message is that online professional development is most effective when it is integrated with face-to-face activities in a multi-faceted, ongoing professional development program. This article was published in the September 2002 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology, a publication of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

Instructional Design for Online Course Development 

http://www.ion.illinois.edu/IONresources/instructionalDesign/index.asp

The Illinois Online Network includes a PowerPoint presentation on the topic, articles on issues for course developers and other resources.  

KYVU Course Development Resource Guide
http://www.kyvu.org/partners/quality_audit_1-23-01_screen.pdf
Kentucky Virtual University has developed a template designed to use when developing online courses. An additional use of the document is for evaluation of a course.

Online Course Design & Delivery, Specialist Training, ETLO Online Course Development
http://www.edtechleaders.org/programs/ocd_training.htm
This link is to the overview of the semester-long online training course to prepare to be an online teacher by Education Development Center Inc.

Online Course Development: What Does it Cost?

Syllabus.  Judith V. Boettcher  http://www.campus-technology.com/print.asp?ID=9676

Does it cost less to design and develop online teaching and learning today than it did a few years ago? Are the categories of cost different today from the past and from what the costs might be in the future? The costs of developing online programs are significant, yet there are few resources to help planners. Here, Judith Boettcher proposes a few guidelines for predicting the costs involved in the design and development of online instruction.

Online Professional Development for Teachers: A Collaborative Model, Barbara Treacy and Kirsten Johnson, Education Development Center Inc.
(EDC), Merrick Lofton, Catahoula Parish, LA School Board, and Paula Paul, Concordia Parish, LA School Board (July/August 1999)
http://www.edtechleaders.org/Resources/articles/collaborative.htm
This article is about the first in a series of online professional development workshops organized as a collaboration between EDC and two Louisiana school districts through a U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant, "America 2000: Making Inroads to the Backroads." The article describes the project background and the workshops' design and organization, and it provides a detailed focus on the facilitation model designed to support the workshop goals and participant needs.

The People — Process — Product Continuum in E-Learning: The E-Learning P3 Model by Badrul H. Khan. Educational Technology. September-October 2004. http://bookstoread.com/etp/elearning-p3model.pdf
The author divides e-learning into two processes: (1) content development and (2) content delivery and maintenance.He identifies various roles and responsibilities involved in e-learning and addresses the process of building e-learning resources. He also outlines the different roles of the people who need to be involved from planning and design to production and evaluation.

Quality Framework for Online Education. http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/SLOANC~41.html 

The quality framework is a tool for continuously improving online programs in higher education.  Based on recommendations of the higher education community, the quality framework provides ways of demonstrating institutional quality.  As institutions continuously improve pedagogy, and as technology evolves, the framework itself is a work in progress, designed to facilitate the sharing of effective practices among institutions. The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. 

What Considerations Should Be Made In Order To Develop Accessible Web-based Distance Learning Courses? AccessIT and the University of Washington
http://www.washington.edu/accessit/articles?173
This document contains the accessibility needs of instructors and students to keep in mind when creating online courses. The accessibility of authoring tools and Web pages are also addressed.

 

For more iinformation, e-mail Bill Thomas at bthomas@sreb.org.