Gamification, Reflection, and Localization in an Online Teacher Training Program
Gamification, Reflection, and Localization in an Online Teacher Training Program
The Instructional Design Project
Design Problem: Design, development, and implementation of a synchronous online teacher training that enables transfer of Computational Thinking (CT) skills to help teachers identify examples in CT, specific to the subject that they teach.
The CSPathshala program promotes the teaching and learning of computational thinking (CT) skills through continuous professional development trainings in CT provided to K-12 teachers. They have created a community of practice of K-12 teachers in India. While trainings were mostly conducted face-to-face in a school setting, the pandemic forced teachers and master trainers to quickly transition online.
Not only do teachers need to learn online but they also need to teach CT in an online setting, something they had never done before. To help teachers make this transition as smoothly as possible, this project was undertaken to transform the teacher trainings in CT to an online setting in a way that can be easily replicated by the teachers themselves.
A total of 69 in-service teachers from a group of 13 schools in the state of Maharashtra, India participated in this professional development training. Participants were teachers in primary (Grades 1 – 5), secondary (Grades 6 – 10), and higher secondary (Grades 11 – 12) grades in their respective school. They were math, science, social science, language, or computer science teachers. Some but not all of the teachers had received prior training on CT skills. These teachers are a part of a community of practice created by CSPathshala.
The training was also attended by three master trainers and two school principals as observers of teacher participation and training effectiveness.
The main design challenges in this project were:
Defining CT: What constructs define CT? What does CT comprise?
Learning Objective of Learning Transfer: Teachers should be able to transfer learning such that they can identify examples of CT relevant to the subject that they teach.
Comfort with Technology: Technology tools used for training needed to be easy to use, access, and implement. They should incur minimal to no cost for the teachers or the schools involved. They should require minimal on-boarding time for rapid implementation in teaching.
The following design constraints were identified:
Participants based in India. Time Zone difference of 12 hours.
Training to be conducted within 3 - 4 hours on a single allotted day in a synchronous manner.
A large variation in prior knowledge of CT among participants.