The potential of MOOCs for large-scale teacher professional development in contexts of mass displacement

Abstract

The mass displacement of people across the world, currently estimated at 65 million, creates a massive demand for new forms of education for children, young people and adults. However, this cannot be addressed without attending to what this means for teachers and other professionals involved in education and training. Clearly, there is a need for large-scale teacher professional development (TPD). Digital technology has the potential to meet this demand, but challenges are presented by the poor digital infrastructure in contexts of mass displacement. Data from two projects are analysed to explore the viability of scaling up TPD in the form of co-designed massive open online courses (MOOCs). The first data set is from a co-designed TPD MOOC project Blended Learning Essentials, to show that digital technology can be effective for scaling up TPD, but that a sustainability plan must be in place from the outset. The second data set is from a project that built on the first to run stakeholder co-design workshops in Lebanon, as a way of developing large-scale TPD in this most challenging context. Lebanon has the highest proportion of refugee to host communities in the world. This case study indicates that MOOCs could be viable in such a context, but also highlights the need to balance the generic principles being offered with a focus on localized practice. A theory of change is presented to outline a method of meeting these challenges by employing a co-design methodology to create self-sustaining digital TPD in the context of Lebanon, and to test this model with the contexts of mass displacement experienced by other participants in the MOOC.

Investigating In-service Elementary School Teachers’ Satisfaction with Participating in MOOC for Teaching Biological Concepts

“…T45 Course could be extended to more hours so that we have even more knowledge on the subject but also because we had such a nice atmosphere and had such a good time… in a course that was offered for free." educational needs, result which agrees with the findings from Kennedy and Laurillard (2019). Likewise, the satisfaction from the constant encouragement, support and feedback with constructive comments from the instructor was demonstrated in our research as well as in the research of Prestridge and Tondeur (2015).…”

“…Recently MOOCs addressed teachers (online Teacher Professional Development -oTPD) giving a new dynamic to the field. Research (Kennedy & Laurillard, 2019;Κoukis & Jimoyiannis, 2017Κoukis & Jimoyiannis, , 2019 has shown that teachers are satisfied with the design and the implementation of TPD -MOOCs and Yoo (2016) argues that the involvement of teachers in online experiences of professional development programs improves their self-efficacy. According to Cho and Rathbun (2013) the asynchronous discussions that take place in MOOCs improve the active participation and allow the creation of self-controlled and self-directed learning environments and Rahimi, Henze, Hermans, and Barendsen (2018) state that MOOCs can link educational content to the curriculum.…”

“…In this context Donitsa-Schmidt and Topaz (2018) note the general satisfaction of the participants from such a learning experience and their intention to participate in other MOOCs in the future. Borko (2004) and Guskey and Yoon (2009) agree that learning for teachers is a process of participation, practice and collaboration on teaching methods and MOOCs contribute in this direction through a flexible, collaborative and constructive process (Håklev & Slotta, 2017;Kennedy & Laurillard, 2019). The benefits of participation in this type of professional development programs are its usually free offer, the access they provide to OER, the creation of learning communities and the issuance of a certificate, which sometimes validates the acquisition of qualifications by the participants.…”

A bibliometric review on latent topics and trends of the empirical MOOC literature (2008–2019)

“…Teacher education research has looked at various elements associated with teacher development. For example, Kennedy and Laurillard ( 2019 ) examined the use of co-design models in MOOC projects to deliver teacher professional development (TPD) and developed a ToC model that could be applied to TPD for mass displacement, which could assist in the professional development needs of MOOC teachers with MOOC in mass displacement. Course gamification and recommendation research has mainly examined the elements associated with MOOC course improvements, such as gamification and recommendations.…”

De-Colonising Planning Education? Exploring the Geographies of Urban Planning Education Networks

“…Moreover, the potential of MOOCs and digital tools to target populations, which do not form part of localised networks, has been increasingly explored. For example, recent work by Kennedy and Laurillard (2019) shows the challenges and opportunities for co-designing digital technologies to provide teacher professional education in the context of mass displacement. The large scale and wide reach of these technologies as well as their ability to accommodate localized context as well as generic principles, have implications for re-dressing especially the unequal distribution of access to education.…”