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Education Schools Playing Online PD Catch-Up

Sharon Kortman, left, director of BEST Professional Development, based on the Phoenix campus of Arizona State University, and Kelly Olson-Stewart, a BEST regional professional coordinator, talk via video with educators at a school in Tucson.

—Laura Segall for Education Week

Offerings from many schools of education are more aligned with traditional face-to-face approaches

By Ian Quillen

Even at the most progressive schools of education, offering online professional development to practicing teachers can be difficult.

Teachers are looking online for professional development in part to find options that can improve their current classroom practice and be incorporated into lesson plans immediately. But the offerings from many schools of education are more aligned with a traditional, labor-intensive approach that constitutes a pathway toward a graduate certificate or degree, education school leaders say.

Those leaders say teachers are more likely to seek out the type of online training that will have a direct impact on their students from government agencies, nonprofit consortia, and for-profit companies. But a few schools of education are trying to meet that demand for flexibility, in part because administrators and teachers say they want colleges of education to be involved. And for colleges of education, offering non-degree programs online makes more sense than doing so in person, in part because of the very nature of how schools...