Professional Development: Preparing School Administrators for a Digital Age and Students for Success

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1. Introduction

 Because of schools around the world are embracing online learning as a prominent feature on university campuses (Lederman and Jaschik, 2013), education must be prepared for this influx of technologically driven students. Online learning is engaging the student in reflective and collaborative thought processes through learner-to-learner interaction results in the most effective learning (Cox and Cox, 2008: 553). Cox and Cox added that online learning can open the doors to communication powerful tool to educate today’s population of scholars because they are already submersed in it through social media, texting, and the Internet.

 To support the need for increased professional development for instructors of online courses, a study reported that 70 per cent of faculty members describe their institution’s support for online instruction as average or below and nearly 20 per cent of all institutions do not offer any support, more than one-third of faculty members who have developed or taught an online course report that developing and teaching online courses takes much more work than traditional courses (Herman, 2012: 88). Among the types of training that Herman advocates for are those provided through professional development from academic leaders and training tied to evaluation programs. Therefore, attention needs to be turned to the academic leaders such as coordinators, directors, and deans of distance learning.

 Furthermore, Lane (2013) explains that online course training requires a different set of skills from academic leaders and appropriate professional development programs should be in place. This is a leadership gap because programs should be established by the administrators to ensure all avenues of learning are addressed. As the enforcers of the university’s strategic plan, academic leaders should be held accountable for training the staff to teach growing numbers of online courses. Students’ experiences in online learning are a direct result of the instruction they receive. However, instructors can only educate students based on the knowledge and training they receive. Furthermore, academic leaders should employ strategies to bridge the gap between the instructor and the online learning platform.