by Computing Education Blog
These are really exciting results. Done well, on-line professional development is as effective as face-to-face professional development as published in ACM Transactions on Computing Education. These results are promising for our CSLearning4U project. In particular, the benefit that Barry Fishman saw is what we were most hoping for, based on our studies with Klara Benda — it’s all about fitting into the teachers’ lives. Of course, the devil is in how the teacher training is designed and executed. ”There are no shortcuts in professional development,” Fishman stressed. In the study, teachers who received the online professional development weren’t just plopped in front of YouTube. Instead, the group took a series of self-paced “short courses” via computer. They also interacted online with facilitators who helped them through the units and answered their questions.
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