Over two iterations of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for school leaders, Launching Innovation in Schools, we developed and tested design elements to support the transfer of online learning into offline action. Effective professional learning is job-embedded: learners should employ news skills and knowledge at work as part of their learning experience. This MOOC aimed to get participants to plan and actually launch new change efforts, and a subset of our most engaged participants were able and willing to do so during the course. Required assessments spurred student actions, along with instructor calls to action and modeling and exemplars provided by course elements. We found that participants led change initiatives, held stakeholder meetings, collected new data about their contexts, and shared and used course materials collaboratively. Collecting data about participant learning and behavior
is an Instructional Developer with the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. Her current interests are project-based learning, simulations involving leadership scenarios, and the intersection of technology and education.
Over two iterations of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for school leaders, Launching Innovation in Schools, we developed and tested design elements to support the transfer of online learning into offline action. Effective professional learning is job-embedded: learners should employ new skills and knowledge at work. We aimed to get participants to both plan and actually launch new change efforts, and a subset of our most engaged participants were willing to do so during the course. Assessments, instructor calls to action, and exemplars supported student actions. We found that participants led change initiatives, held stakeholder meetings, collected new data about their contexts, and shared and used course materials collaboratively. Collecting data about participant learning and behavior outside the MOOC environment is essential for researchers and designers looking to create effective online environments for professional learning.
The mission of the Teaching Systems Lab is to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. Between 2017 and 2019, the lab released four MOOCs on change leadership, including Launching Innovation in Schools, Design Thinking for Leading and Learning, Envisioning the Graduate of the Future, and Competency-Based Education: The What, Why and How. This submission is a compendium of review papers describing findings from six instantiations of these four courses.
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