About the Conference

Chris Dede provides an overview of this year's conference. Watch video

Sponsored by HGSE and the National Science Foundation's Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education, “Evolving a Research Agenda for Online Teacher Professional Development,” is a small working conference of researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and funders. This group will collaboratively evolve a research agenda by contrasting current findings from exemplary projects, building collective insights from these results, and proposing key themes and related methodologies for studying the evolution of effective online teacher professional development models. Participants in this meeting will include scholars studying these challenges, educators from implementation sites involved in their research, and national and state policymakers. This will enable representatives of these communities to share their insights and to provide the strong links between theory and practice whose absence often undercuts promising innovations.

Save the Date
We will hold the conference at HGSE September 8-9, 2005. About 100 people will participate, by invitation only. Prior to the conference, ten presenters will develop commissioned papers about their work that all attendees will read in advance. At the start of each conference session, the lead presenter will give a brief ten-minute summary of his or her paper, and an educator or evaluator involved in that project will co-present a five-minute précis of field-based perspectives on this oTPD implementation. The remainder of the session will center on attendees discussing the strengths and limits of that model for oTPD and the research methods used to study its effectiveness. Closing sessions at the conference will focus on identifying similarities and differences among the exemplary models and their underlying theories, as well as on delineating the implications of this comparative analysis for large-scale, effective teacher preparation, induction, and professional development.