Advancing Work Practices Through Online Professional Development: A Study of the Effectiveness of Online Professional Development Illustrated by an Empirical Case of Danish K-5 Science Teachers

The natural expectation for professional development courses is that they will improve a participant’s work performance, but do they? This PhD research challenges several assumptions underlying the design of online professional development courses, revealing that it is after such interventions that the real challenge surfaces. The challenge of transferring learning to initiate change in work behaviors is present in extant research, but research has not yet thoroughly investigated that even when change is initiated, the effectiveness of the course is still being tested. For sustained change, practitioners must find evidence of the effectiveness of changed behavior in practice. Practitioners may feel insecure and incompetent when doing their jobs differently, and individuals at work may react to changes in behavior in unexpected ways. This leads practitioners to conclude that a course was not effective and subsequently terminate change that could have advanced their practices. This underlines the need to think beyond the course format to make online professional development interventions continuous, committing, and contextual. The research suggests rethinking online professional development as adaptive “just-in-time” technologies and proposes a design theory called “situated online professional development,” entailing six design principles for advancing work practices.