Online Collaborative Learning Communities (OCLCs): Pathways to Promote Teachers’ Professional Development in Transformative Educational System
Bhornsawan Inpin

Mae Fah Luang University

Abstract

With the dramatic and utmost advancement in a new
paradigm shift of education, there is inevitably noticed that
instructional designers (IDs) prioritize their professional development
to help students gain their academic achievement and pursue their
professional goals. Apart from that, technology, especially online
learning, appears to play an important role to facilitate learning and
becomes one of the popular ways to deliver instruction at any level of
education with the flexibility to access anytime anywhere. With this
ultimate goal, it is to bring IDs learning together rather than isolating
them. This makes online collaborative learning (OCL) begin. The
purposes of this study were to enrich OCLCs for promoting teachers’
professional development in a transformative educational system and
explore attitudes towards the use of OCLCs to promote teachers’
professional development. The instruments used for this study were
observation with a role of a participant observer and focus group
interviews. The results of this study found that OCLCs can help
enriching IDs to pursue their professional development based on three
key constructs: interactivity, social context, and technologies proposed
by Tu & Corry (2002). For interactivity, IDs were found enthusiastic
to express their opinions with their peers. They shared their
knowledge, narrated their own experiences, and inspired each other.
Next was social context. IDs learned how to manage their group. They
selected one representative to act as a leader to manage the group and
played respect to each other. Apart from that, they shared similar
goals, interests, and experiences with others. Last but not least,
technologies, they were comfortable to employ technologies to deliver
knowledge, interests, and experiences for stimulating their knowledge
development.

Keywords: — Online Collaborative Learning Communities, Teachers’ Professional Development; Transformative Educational System

Topic: Pedagogical Innovations in TVET