June 2005 — Industry Perspective
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No Teacher Left Behind
Fortunately, eLearning solutions are now available that enable schools and districts to offer online professional development solutions which replicate the key instructional tools of a traditional classroom: curriculum delivery, collaboration, communication, and assessment. The advantage of these online corollaries is that they not only encourage and facilitate learning through a class-like experience, but they do so in an uninterrupted fashion that provides continued interaction, added mentoring, and other ongoing support.
The Power of Deeper Support
The distinction between a one-time session versus an ongoing community of practice sparks the question of what continuing professional education really is and what it has the potential to be. As it is often practiced, continuing ed can be a misleading term. In its traditional form, it seldom includes real ongoing professional development beyond discrete educational sessions. Maintaining a satisfactory level of teacher engagement beyond the in-service classroom remains an ever-present problem.
Still, new technologies can provide deeper, more powerful educational support that can include ongoing,dynamic elements such as document and lesson plan review, working groups, and discussion boards—all important supplements to on-site face-toface staff development programs. Such approaches create a true network of learners that can support each other as key lessons get implemented back into the classroom.
Conquering Time and Distance
Obtaining access to professional development programs has been a particular problem in rural areas. To obtain necessary training, and with the closest training center sometimes several hours away, rural teachers often must deal with significant time/travel constraints, which have been exacerbated by recent budget pressures.
Today, the problem g'es beyond rural areas. Vast suburbs growing up around large metropolitan areas have created widely distributed school districts in which teachers must confront similar training difficulties. And in large urban districts, scheduling the amount of in-service days needed to cover the full range of instructional, technological, and local policy initiatives— while still increasing classroom hours—has created a daunting challenge.
Previous solutions have been unsatisfactory. Distance learning solutions that relied on rigidly scheduled televised training sessions still required teachers to travel to teleconferencing centers or central school locations at a specific time. Such travel represented a significant loss of time, money, and productivity. Cost notwithstanding, teachers also faced the challenge of simply finding the time in their normal schedules to attend sessions at all.
Compared with those programs, the utility and convenience of Web-based professional development options are clear. In Blackboard’s case, client school systems in rural and sprawling districts have quickly latched on to new eLearning technologies to deliver Web-based professional development programs to their teachers. Urban districts also have expanded online and selfpaced learning opportunities for busy teachers, particularly around new districtreform initiatives or policy changes. Key capabilities such as streaming video, along with the use of synchronous tools, make distance learning an effective and satisfying interactive experience accessible 24/7.
