Like traveling by air, taking courses online offers several key advantages — an impressive array of places to go and many connections to get you there. Online learning offers freedom, convenience, and the ability to connect with peers all over the country. And with professional development requirements for educators mounting, teachers are increasingly looking for professional development opportunities that can fit into their already busy schedules.
 
The convergence of demand for classes and the need for convenience has fueled the creation of new or expanded online professional services, such as Internet-based new teacher support, mentorship training, and specific courses tailored to meet states´ No Child Left Behind requirements for “highly qualified” teachers. From discrete math to classroom management skills, today´s online learning offers a wealth of hubs from which teachers can soar to almost any virtual destination.

When Instructor talked to teachers who had taken online courses, what we heard most often was that teachers needed and valued convenience and flexibility. “A real strength of this type of professional development is the self-paced aspect — the option of working in classes around your own schedule,” says Glenn Rustay, a National Board Certified Teacher and assistant principal in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Rustay, who has taken four online classes towards a master´s degree, emphasizes that all that is needed to sign on is an e-mail account and a reliable Internet provider — ease of mind for the tech-phobic.
 
Instructor´s short list of online professional development (PD) organizations for teachers (see "A Sample of Online Programs," above) is a good starting point for finding a class to take or resources you need. Each of these course providers offers a wealth of options, including threaded discussion boards covering topics relevant to the course content, 24–48 hour turnaround for answering participants´ questions, and a way for students to e-mail one another. For schools or districts that might be uncomfortable with fully online course delivery, many providers offer customized options that combine online instruction with on-site facilitators or teachers.

The power of the Internet to bring people together, whether informally or in a structured class environment, is an appealing element built into many online courses. The teachers interviewed by Instructor emphasized that the feedback and academic support they received from instructors and fellow students was a crucial element. The interaction fostered a real sense of community.
 
Through taking online professional development and mentorship classes, says Karen Vanek, an elementary-school teacher and staff development leader in the Houston (TX) Independent School District, she had a chance to get to know peers from across her large and diverse district, “which gave me perspectives I hadn't had access to before.” Vanek adds that when she hit occasional snags during an Internet-based pilot project in her district, she discovered the online camaraderie helped her morale. “You found out that you weren't the only one confused about something. 'Talking' online with the other teachers involved made me feel that I wasn't alone,” she says.
 
Teachers coming together as a learning community constitutes an important element of online professional development, according to PBS TeacherLine senior director Rob Ramsdell. “We feel quite passionately that if you get 20 teachers together and build a community of learners,” says Ramsdell, “the teachers can work through one another's questions and help each other grow.” Funded by a Ready to Teach grant from the U.S. Department of Education, TeacherLine has trained more than 500 facilitators to help teachers connect with one another as they participate in its online courses.

While the majority of teachers we talked to considered peer-to-peer communication an important part of their online learning experience, some mentioned a few drawbacks. Glenn Rustay, for example, found that during group chats, the inability to respond at the speed of normal speech —particularly when the discussion got heated and one's fingers weren't nimble enough — left some students in the dust. Small desktop videocameras would also be helpful, he says, so intent and nuance aren't lost.
 
Mandatory discussion-group participation, however, does occasionally leave teachers feeling over-engaged. When Julie Graff, an eighth-grade English teacher in Brooklyn, New York, took an online course that was demanding in terms of content and assignments, she was surprised at the mandated level of participation. All participants were required to respond to other classmates' queries or discussion points. “I was taken aback when I first logged on because I always had to respond. It can be difficult if some of your classmates are especially 'chatty,'” says Graff. She admitted, however, that, as the class came to an end, she found that she began to appreciate the discussion group. “I did begin to feel more of an emotional connection to my fellow students,” says Graff.
 
For other teachers, online classes don't always offer enough interaction with peers. Jim Berman, a culinary arts teacher at New Castle County Vocational Technical School in Delaware, took a course in classroom management offered by the University of Phoenix Online. While Berman was pleased with the content and the instructor, he wanted more contact with fellow students. “If I could design my own online class, I'd offer an open forum, where we could talk about work-related issues and how they could be applied to real-world experience in the classroom,” says Berman.

The opportunity afforded by the Internet for peer-to-peer support is the basis of a new tool being developed for teachers, particularly those who are in the first five years of teaching — when the highest percentage of teachers quit. To help reverse this trend and to counter isolation felt by many classroom teachers, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) formed a consortium to create T-LINC (Teachers Learning in Networked Communities). T-LINC will provide Web-based collaboration forums where teachers can seek advice and support and exchange ideas with their peers. The first phase of implementation will roll out pilot programs in four districts around the country. “New teachers need more support, and this project is about constructing an available way to collaborate,” says Kathleen Fulton, the director of Reinventing Schools for the 21st Century at NCTAF. “At the same time, it won't just focus on new teachers, but on providing induction into a community of overall support.”
 
This year, the AT&T Foundation awarded planning grants to NCTAF and its five partners. While the intended primary function of T-LINC is teacher-to-teacher networking, Fulton says, districts could also use the network to conduct professional development online.

Karen Vanek, a veteran of several professional development classes, including courses in cooperative learning and mentorship, speaks plainly about what is good, bad, and ugly. “It was great that I could do it at midnight; I could do it at my own pace,” she says. “And I thought that much of the content was of a very high quality.” However, for one course, she says, “We needed clearer instructions, especially in the beginning. What we really needed was a trained facilitator, someone who had actual experience doing this kind of course.”
 
One available solution is the “blended” model of professional development, which combines electronic and print media with on-site facilitators trained to help teachers transition into new forms of learning and instructional content. Providers of this type of “blended” delivery include LessonLab, which provides a full range of subject-matter courses, and Scholastic Red, which focuses on improving reading and literacy in grades K–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12. Both companies offer continuing and graduate education credits.
 
The mix of on-site and online “is a model that is being used more and more,” says John Lent, vice president of professional development at Scholastic, Inc. “Initially, we conduct a needs assessment of the district — including children's reading scores and the grade levels of the teachers — then we train people at the school in the fundamentals of coaching, as well as in the content of our courses. We train a site-based person as the course facilitator and, if it's an option, the principal of the school, so that there's ongoing on-site support.”

Societal and legislative changes — such as the passage of No Child Left Behind — have helped fuel the growth of the online professional development medium. The mandate that more teachers be “highly qualified” and more “technology-proficient,” and the pressure on administrators to provide “anytime, anywhere high-quality professional development” has created momentum that can sustain the growth of online PD, says PBS TeacherLine's Ramsdell.
 
The call for more accessible professional development — and the need for states and districts to account for it — has given software developers incentive to build in more tools for administrators, according to Sonny Magana, education manager USA of SchoolKiT International. NCLB “has been an affirmation of the content we offer, to assist bringing teachers to 'highly qualified' status,” he says.
 
“Additionally, districts have to somehow capture evidence that teachers have taken professional development courses, and we've added a component to our software package that will allow administrators to track what's happening from one central location.” Magana says that his company is finding increased demand in the area of technology integration — for example, improving and demonstrating lessons through available technologies like Microsoft Office.
 
Teachers of the PreK–K years are also being gradually introduced to online PD. As states begin to develop learning benchmarks for Head Start and other preschool and kindergarten students, more attention is being paid to the qualifications of those who teach the very young. In the Early Care and Education (ECE) field, where close to 50 percent of workers have a high-school diploma but little or no post-secondary education, child care experts recognize the link between better educated teachers and higher quality instruction.
 
“Online professional development for ECE teachers may prove to be an effective, accessible means of improving the quality of teachers entering the field, as well as enhancing the knowledge base of veteran early childhood educators,” says Sharon Lynn Kagan, Ed.D., the Virginia and Leonard Marx professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University.

How can an individual teacher, or a district administrator responsible for selecting online staff development, make a good choice and avoid low quality or unreliable providers?
 
Academic rigor, the research base for the content, and the reputation of the provider are all key to the selection process, says John Kitzmiller, a seventh-grade math teacher at the Hanover Public Schools in Vermont. “An important part of doing a quality check is choosing a school or organization that has a good name — make sure that it's affiliated with a good university,” he says. Kitzmiller, who took electronically-delivered graduate and PD classes in mathematics and computer technology, noted that the providers were affiliated with major universities, including Harvard, Ohio State, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Classes used a combination of CD, Web, e-mail, and online “chats.”
 
And what about “newbies,” the uninitiated who might be intimidated by Internet-based learning? “If I were to design or lead an online course, I would suggest that the participants 'team up' and have an experienced classmate be a virtual mentor to the person who might be doing this for the first time,” says Glenn Rustay, the assistant principal from Port St. Lucie. “A lot of people don't want to call on their professor and would much rather work with a peer.”
 
Ideally, Rustay would also include videos of teachers demonstrating best practices in the classroom, something that Apple, ISTE, AT&T, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards have begun to do through the Digital Edge Learning Interchange.
 
Watching video clips of experienced, passionate classroom teachers can make the process much more teacher-friendly. Tina Tiernan, executive director of product management and online higher education for Laureate Education, which provides advanced degree programs and graduate courses through Canter and through Walden University, says that their films of master teachers in action serve as an important model for online students. Teachers can “take a class online, then walk into their classrooms and implement these strategies straight off,” says Tiernan.
 
Despite the occasional turbulence along the learning curve, the combined forces of convenience, accessibility, and increased requirements for teachers appear to have positioned online professional development classes as a permanent alternative to the “old school” way of doing PD. Teachers: Get ready to choose your destination!

 
Roberta Salvador is the Communications Specialist at the National Center for Children and Families (NCCF) at Teachers College, Columbia University. As a journalist, she has covered ed tech for more than a decade. This article was originally published in the October 2004 issue of Instructor.