The Future of Online Learning

Our district is continuing to support and fund virtual learning for PK-12 as a choice for our families. Because of this, virtual teacher training has already begun and there is a plan in place to continue to development of those teachers. The focus of these sessions is high quality lesson design, engagement strategies, and digital capacity for these teachers and students. Moving to professional learning, adults have been highly motivated to attend virtual training and self-paced eCourses. We continually work with the specialists in charge of creating the courses to inlcude multi-modal particiaption and ways to recieve and transmit information.

Challenges that we once had include:

• "Information dump" where everything the participant needs to know is just listed and thrown out there. This is overload and has been remedied by chunking into meaningful modules or sections.

• No opportunities to discuss or collaborate, leaving the experience very one-sided. This can be fixed by interjecting points of discussion with the proper digital tools.

• No opportunities for participant output, another one-sdied experience. We found that if the instructor is doing all the heavy lifting, that the learning does not stick with the particiapant.

• Lack of moments to build a community of learning, no connection to peers and/or the instructor. Interjecting personality, as well as opportunities to connect with one another in a non-threatening way proved beneficial.

• Lack of engagement, ownership, or authentic assignments embedded. Activities and assessments need to be purposeful and relate directly to the course. Participants need to have to opportunity to invest in their product and put it to use in their classroom.

• Sustainabilty of monitoring the discussion, assignments, and measure of success. This can be addressed by capping attendee numbers, spacing out assignments, or assigning only that which is valuable to the purpose of your course outcome. If the activity is not connected to the goals of the course, it does not need to be included!

All of these lessons learned apply directly to the creation of the eCourse for this class and will apply as I move forward in crating self-paced opportuniites for the educators in my district.