professional development
Q3):
Discus the role of open and distance education in professional development of
teachers.
Ans. Combining
teacher education and open distance learning
* professional development for early childhood educators
* professional development for early childhood teachers
A growing
literature has been devoted to reviewing the strengths and limitations of OLD
in teacher education. A useful synthesis of those themes requiring careful was provided
by Perraton, who focused on three expectations of teaching a profession;
identification of the stakeholders influencing and controlling that profession;
and the curriculum of teacher education.
Higher
education through open and distance learning traced efforts to develop teacher
education programmers using varying degrees of OLD in institutions as diverse
as the Bangladesh Open University, the Indira Gandhi National open university,
the Open University of Tanzania, the university of the south pacific and the
university of the west Indies. Included in the same book were OLD experiences
in China, Latin America and South Africa.
Some of this
literature has focused on the rapidly developing technologies available to
support teacher education via OLD. For example, fung investigated the use of
printed materials in an service primary school distance teacher education
course and found that the participating teachers agreed that the materials
achieved the course objectives but that distance teacher educators must find
ways to encourage learners to engage in in-text activities if such activities
are to achieve their potential and that research on print materials
particularly on ways of achieving goals in teacher education should not be
neglected at a time of increasing use of distance education in teacher
education.
This is
timely reminder given that the capacity to afford more technically
sophisticated technologies is unevenly distributed among countries and
institutions, and given the widespread assumption that providing content in a
particular format automatically facilitates learner’s engagement with that
content. Similar concerns attend a very different set of technologies more
recently associate with distance learning for teachers professional development
mobile devices.
These
factors apply also to other technologies, including print as noted by fung and
reinforce the need for caution in selecting a particular technological mix when
planning a teacher education programmer for open and distance learners. Considerable
diversity also exists in target groups for teacher education programmers via
OLD.
With more
teachers taking on postgraduate study butcher and sieminski focused on the
development of a doctor of education programmer via distance at the Open University
in the United Kingdom.
This is a
definitive assertion not only of a distinct differentiation between face to
face and distance education but also of the superiority of distance education
provided it is accompanied by the appropriate and ragogical principles and
support mechanisms to face to face education for these particular learners.
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