Design Principles for the Online Continuous Professional Development of Teachers

Abstract

Nowadays, most teachers face the incorporation of ICT tools in their teaching as a burden. The encumbrance is in the process of searching, selecting, setting up, including it in classroom and evaluating its impact. Teachers that have the courage and time to go through this process tend to be successful, but many of them may not repeat the experience because of the considerable effort demanded by the tasks. The HandsOn ICT project aims at facilitating the integration of ICT tools in teaching and learning by developing a learning-by-doing environment to be explored by teachers themselves or with the guidance of a mentor. The end goal is to improve the quality of teaching and learning by increasing the digital skills of teachers and as a consequence of their students. This paper presents the outcomes from the comparative study on twenty one cases addressing the sectors of primary/secondary, higher and vocational education, which took place with an aim to inform the design and development of the HOI training content and environment. Furthermore, a set of principles that need to be addressed during the design of continuous professional development of teachers are presented based on these case studies and the experience among the consortium.