Physical education (PE) teachers have increased access to digital/online continuous professional development (CPD) activities, notably through social media (Gleddie et al., 2016), blogs (Fletcher et al., 2016), and recently,... [ view full abstract ]
Physical education (PE) teachers have increased access to digital/online continuous professional development (CPD) activities, notably through social media (Gleddie et al., 2016), blogs (Fletcher et al., 2016), and recently, Massive Open Online Courses (Griffiths et al., 2017). Yet there are few robust accounts of the types of online/digital professional development activities that teachers engage with, as well as their perceptions of these environments and the related impacts on their learning (Goodyear et al., 2015).The purpose of this study was to explore PE teachers’ engagement with digital/online PE-CPD.
A case study design was adopted of Korean secondary PE teachers. Data were generated from: (i) an open-ended online questionnaire (n=251); (ii) semi-structured interviews (n=20) with teachers. Quantitative data were analyzed for measures of central tendency and variance, and qualitative data were analyzed inductively.
The data suggested that teachers engage with both digital/online CPD in formal (e.g.,online course ) and informal contexts (e.g., instant messenger). Formal digital/online CPD was engaged with to meet mandatory CPD requirement, yet the content was considered to be weak. Many teachers engaged with informal online-CPD program through, for example, a Mobile Instant Messenger chat Kakao Talk. In this informal space, teachers could access information that was relevant to their school and practices. However, discussions were often ‘hyjacked’ by a small group of teachers, and a number of teachers were unwilling to actively post for a fear of leaving a digital footprint. Overall, teachers preferred face-to-face CPD experiences and this was reflected in the lower satisfaction scores for digital/online CPD when compared to offline.
Despite new opportunities for teachers to engage in CPD in digital/online environments, data highlights the importance of providing complimentary offline CPD opportunities. The pedagogical design of community and discussion based chat forum requires privacy, structure and facilitation to support teacher engagement and learning.
