CSCL for teacher professional development

Within the last fifteen years, many colleges of the province of Quebec in Canada have been faced with low admission rates in some less popular technical programs. The increased financial burden for these institutions and the enhanced task burden for teachers working with small groups of students threaten the quality of teaching and learning. In order to cope with this situation, computer-mediated collaboration (telecollaboration) was used to provide teachers with the opportunity to work with colleagues from other colleges who teach similar courses. In this short paper, the impacts of telecollaboration on resources diversity and teacher professional development are examined. After four semesters of experimentation, questionnaires and interviews suggest that teachers learned from their colleagues as they shared ideas and acquired pedagogical and technopedagogical knowledge and skills.