Assessing the Impact of a Large-Scale Online Teacher Professional Development Community

TAPPED INTM is an online community that supports teachers’ professional growth through both formal education and professional development programs provided by a coalition of partner organizations and informal activities that occur year-round. The authors of this paper are members of both the community and a research team investigating whether and how the design of our online environment can help foster a culture of learning within a large and diverse community of education professionals. The community is now three years old, and we believe it is time to examine its impact more closely. In this paper, we review data collected from a survey that was recently sent to the educators in the community. Specifically, we examine how experiences in TAPPED IN affect teaching and teachers. Overview of TAPPED IN The concept of community of practice has become a major theme of teacher professional development (TPD). Advocates claim that communities of practice can be powerful catalysts for enabling teachers to improve their practice (Lieberman, 1996; Hawkins, 1999) and for innovative TPD efforts to achieve sustainability and scalability (Schlager & Schank, 1997; Schlager, Fusco, & Schank, in press). Currently, professional development in the teaching profession differs from that in most other professions in that the process is heavily skewed toward pockets of formal, highly structured activities outside the context of their actual work (Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles, 1998). Similarly, most teacher education programs provide students with little access to the larger community of education professionals outside the university, at best providing internships at a local school. To understand the profession and become contributing members of the teaching community of practice, preservice teachers need access to that community on a sustained basis. Although we cannot change school policies or find more time for professional development, TAPPED IN, as an education community of practice, can help provide opportunities and mechanisms for teachers of all levels to overcome their isolation and make more effective use of time spent on professional growth. Our view is that professional development is a lifelong process in which teachers’ needs change from year to year. Our goal is to begin supporting teachers during their preservice education and continue to serve them as they become leaders in their professional community. We envision a year-round TPD process that balances formal TPD efforts and informal professional activities that are characteristic of other professional communities of practice. Our approach is to invite organizations representing divergent perspectives to be tenants in the TAPPED IN environment and use it to help accomplish their own TPD agendas. In this way, online tools and practices become part of their institutional culture rather than tangential add-ons. If one tenant organization leaves, another can take its place, and the community continues evolving over time as individual groups form and disband and projects begin and end. Each organization leaves behind a bit of its expertise in the form of members who continue to participate in the community, thus enabling the community to become an ever-widening source of expertise. We currently support a growing community of 15 organizations and over 6,000 members. On any given day in TAPPED IN, one can observe teachers, administrators, district coordinators, state staff, staff developers, university faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, researchers, and the occasional curious guest being resources for one another. Members can be central or peripheral participants in the community. This ability to participate peripherally (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in the activities of others (both as a resource and as a seeker of assistance) is a hallmark of a community of practice and one that we believe is essential to establishing and sustaining professional relationships. By sharing space in TAPPED IN (as opposed to locking teachers into their own proprietary environments), the organizations enable their teachers to have rich interactions with a wide variety of other educators. Our technology is a platform-independent, Web-based, real-time environment designed to meet the needs of a large and diverse community of education professionals (see Schlager & Schank, 1997, for a more complete description: http://www.tappedin.org/info/cscl97.html). Activities occur in virtual rooms that provide a basic yet powerful set of communication mechanisms (directing speech to specific people, whispering, paging, emoting) and support tools (whiteboards, notes, tape recorders, and Web viewers). The structure of the TAPPED IN community and its environment allow great flexibility in designing opportunities for preand inservice teachers to interact with one another and share information, both within and across institutional boundaries. As technology proliferates in schools, the issue of how best to prepare teachers to use it effectively to support their learning and that of their students has come into the fore. For educators to embrace technology and integrate it into their classrooms, they must explore, experiment, and collaborate as a community. We have designed TAPPED IN to be a place that encourages ongoing experimentation and collaboration, and that offers immediate support to teachers as they learn the ropes of both the technology and the community. The TAPPED IN community has been growing for over three years. Since we began conducting community-wide activities, an average of 15% (with a range between 10% and 20%) of members log in at least once each month. In this paper we will present a summary of who our members are, what kinds of activities they engage in online, and how they use technology in their classrooms. In addition, we examine the relationship between how often a member logs in and their perceptions of the benefits they gain from their TAPPED IN experiences. Though a time investment is required before most users become comfortable with the environment, we believe (and many of our experienced members tell us) that the return is well worth the effort. We hypothesize that those who rate themselves as more frequent users of TAPPED IN will report lower levels of professional isolation and positive effects on their knowledge of subject area and teaching techniques. Survey Collection and Data Our survey was developed to help us learn who our members are and how their experiences in TAPPED IN have affected their professional lives. We invited every member of the community to fill out a 133-question survey. We are collecting data on (a) standard demographics and professional development activities, (b) technology use, and skill rating, and (c) TAPPED IN use, affordances, and barriers. We began collecting data on August 30, 1999, online through Web-based forms (available to members at their convenience). We made available a . pdf file for members to download and mail or fax back to us. We also offered to Email, fax, or mail a hard copy of the survey to any member who requested it. Two announcements were Emailed to all the members of the community; reminders were also included in the monthly e-mailings and on the log-in page. The data being examined in this paper were collected through October 28, 1999. Data collection is still ongoing; the reader should consider this paper as a preliminary look at the survey results. The demographics of the survey sample closely match the overall membership. The data set includes 851 survey responses from 282 males (34%) and 550 females (66%); 19 respondents did not specify gender. The gender breakdown of all members (as of 11/29/99) is 4188 females (64.9%) and 2262 males (35.0%). Average age of the respondents was 43.72 (SD = 9.74), with a range of 21-67. Table 1 shows that the sample’s breakdown is comparable to that of the entire community, and that the sample represents the different occupation categories in TAPPED IN. Although the majority of members are teachers, we believe that it is important to have a diverse community of education professionals. Having administrators, librarians, subject area experts, professional development organizations, and others online allows for informal conversations where ideas can be exchanged. In addition, we have a wide range of experience among the teachers. The respondents who listed teaching as their primary occupation have taught from as little as half a year fulltime to 39 years full time with 25% having taught 5 years or less, 50% having taught 13 years or less, and 75% having taught 21 years or less. Table 2 shows that the different subject areas taught by the teachers in TAPPED IN represents a cross-section of the teaching profession. In terms of technology skills, 2.2% of respondents rated themselves as having minimal Internet skills, 21.5% as having moderate, 48.5% as having strong, and 27.8% as having expert Internet skills. Table 3 presents information about reported online technology use by our respondents, and Table 4 presents information about the use of computers by teachers in relationship to their classroom. Occupation n Percent of respondents Population as of 9/99 K-4 5-6 7-8 9-12 K-12 Teacher (total) 98 64 58 125 (345) 11.8 7.7 7.0 15.1 (41.7) 18.9