Building an Online Early Learning Professional Development Community

Designing online learning communities remains on the important challenges for educators. In other postings I have written about the roles for learners in communities and tried to describe general ideas for creating online communities.

In this post, I want to develop an outline for how to create a community focused on child care, parenting, and early learning to elaborate my ideas about online learning communities.

At the moment I mostly have questions rather than answers.

1. Can we create a community that includes for parents and professionals?

There are lots of overlap in terms of the types of issues and concerns faced by both parents and child care professionals. They are both interested in healthy development-- helping children grow, learn, eat nutritiously, be safe, etc. There are some differences especially between those professionals who care for children in centers with multiple children versus a parent with only one child. There are fewer differences between a family child care provider and a parent.

2. What advantages or disadvantages might there be to developing a parent-professional learning community?

The biggest advantage would be that parents and professionals could learn from each other and see the issues that they share in common. The disadvantage is that professionals may want to ask questions and raise issues that they would prefer be discussed within the professional community rather than in the presence of parents. Likewise, parents may be interested in hearing from other parents about issues rather than from professionals on some issues.

3. How would learning be organized?

I would create microlearning opportunities such as short audio, text, and video material that address a single issue, problem or idea such that these microlearning experiences could be assembled into larger learning activities such as lessons, courses, and so forth. My best example of microlearning is the FAQ (frequently asked questions) structure in which there are specific questions with short answers. Likewise, in many cases, these answers are also linked to related questions or additional information. I also think that short quizzes and surveys are other tools that can be easily used to create microlearning situations. Brief audio and video material can also be used to illustrate ideas, topics and experiences that can't be easily captured by words.

4. How would the learning community be organized?

In organizing the learning community, I would return to my ideas about "roles of learners." My idea is there are a range of roles that vary by level of knowledge or ability and level of engagement. I have hypothesized five levels from novice to partner. It is worth noting that I assume that expect for the novice level, in all the other roles I assume that the participants function as both teachers and learners. In short, each person is both responsible for teaching those members at the next role below themselves and learning from the members at the next level above them. Being both teacher and learner is one of the hallmarks of what it means to be in a learning community. (See a more extensive discussion of these roles.)

Here you begin to see one of the challenges of having both parents and professionals in the same learning community. How will people feel about both parents and professionals developing learning materials? Can parents (without other credentials) obtain the role of "expert" in the learning community?

What types of technology tools are needed to support this learning community?

There needs to be an easy way to create FAQs (short question and answers), quiz tools, survey tools, audio and video tools (perhaps just the capacity to upload audio and video rather than editing tools), forums for both synchronous and asynchronous discussions, and tools for assembling short microlearning content into longer and richer learning experiences (e.g., courses, how-to segments, etc.). At the most advanced end there may need to be research tools such as data collection, management and analysis.

Early Learning Educational Platform-- What's Missing?

Over the last several years, Illinois has been building an educational and professional development infrastructure for child care (early learning) professionals. This project known as "Gateways to Opportunity" is designed to bring together all the resources for educating beginning and advanced professionals interested in early care and education. Additionally, there has been a long-term effort to integrate many of the resources for parents and professionals at the Illinois Early Learning Project.

These efforts have advanced the resources for parents and professionals interested in young children and have developed a wide array of useful tools-- newsletters for early learning professionals, a listserv for professionals interested in early care, descriptions of early learning standards and video examples of classrooms, teaching and work with parents, parent materials in Spanish, English and Polish, and much more. There are also many useful links to other resources on the web.

Despite all this useful material, I still feel like something is missing and there is something about the design of these websites that is lacking.

Review of the Illinois Early Learning Project Website

One difficulty is the conceptual structure of this website-- it is organized by structural features of the material rather than by the content. For example, there is a section on "videos" and "tip sheets" (which is actually a reference to the fact that these are designed as print materials). Organizing material by delivery mode is a structural characteristic of the delivery system, but not a characteristic that would be particularly important to a parent or professional who is more likely to be interested in a particular topic, issue or question. This points to another problem with these materials which is that parent and professional material is intertwined. The Illinois Early Learning Project website could easily be organized by the type of learner/client/audience so that parents could find the materials designed for them and professionals could find materials addressed to them.

Review of the Gateways to Opportunity Website

This website is better organized to address the needs of particular types of potential audiences (parents, students, current professionals, etc.) and there is a lot of useful resources located in each section, but I still have the feeling that the organizational structure reflects the resources rather than the interests or questions of the audience. For example, in the section designed for higher education faculty there are many useful links to appropriate resources, but they could be organized around the tasks or needs that higher education might be interested in such as: resources for getting approval as an entitled program, resources for professional development, resources for your students, new teaching resources, and so forth. In short, the website could be organized around the questions or concerns of the audience.

This organizational structure may result in people overlooking valuable resources. For example, the website has an extensive list of research reports listed under the section titled, Resources, but there is no link to this directly from the higher education pages. This list of research studies is likely to include a number of items that would be of interest to higher education faculty either for their own professional development or for their instruction to students.

Adding Interaction, Participation and Community

Increasing websites are incorporating opportunities for online users to interact on the website, participate in the creation of knowledge and building community. (See my general description of these topics and links to other resources about these issues.) In order to build an effective platform to education and professional development in early learning, we will have to build a platform in which there are opportunities for parents and professionals to engage with each other and with the creation of content in these online settings. This means moving beyond websites as places to find information or to tell people about the issues. This calls for a different type of design and a more open online platform.

This is the big challenge for those interested in building an effective learning platform for early learning.