As told by PI Doug Ensley

Edited by Audrey Malagon, Lead Editor, DUE Point Blog

Professional development has traditionally been a face-to-face endeavor, but Dr. Doug Ensley (Professor Emeritus, Shippensburg University) and team are reimagining what is possible for professional development delivered online. The OPEN Math project seeks to not only broaden the availability of online professional development for post-secondary mathematics instructors but also to study how this method could be most effective. Here Dr. Ensley tells us about what they have accomplished so far.

1) What specific needs in the mathematical community motivated you to design this project?

This project flows from the confluence of a systemic problem and a unique opportunity. Professional societies and funding agencies often focus resources on professional development at face-to-face meetings. Such meetings are not always practical (or even possible) for a large portion of the community, and they create significant carbon footprints. The COVID pandemic dramatically increased our ability to interact and engage meaningfully via online platforms. With new strategies, we can reach an audience that doesn’t traditionally have access to instructional training and networks.

2) What challenges and opportunities does hosting professional development online create?

Online professional development requires much more detailed planning. We have to think about what is on the participant’s screen, how we know they are productively working on a task, how they will interact with us or with others, how we will know they have met a lesson objective, etc. In person, these questions might be answered by simply having instructors milling about the room. All that extra planning is worth it, however, because the opportunities online workshops create are so plentiful. They require fewer resources and so the mathematics community can do more of them. More importantly, online workshops can reach scores of people who cannot travel to traditional face-to-face professional development, including contingent faculty, instructors at under-resourced schools, people with mobility challenges, people with caregiving responsibilities that preclude in-person conference attendance, etc.

3) Tell us about some of the professional development programs that have been a part of OPEN math so far.

So far the workshops fall into three categories: (1) course specific workshops where a team is primarily sharing curriculum material to improve a course (for example, Differential Equations, Multivariable Calculus, and Introductory Statistics), (2) pedagogical workshops where participants learn how to implement an innovative practice (such as Inquiry Based Learning or Mastery Grading), and (3) workshops that I would categorize as “meta,” focusing on things like, “How do we make our classrooms inclusive and equitable?”, or ”How do we train graduate students to teach?”

4) What short and long term impacts do you anticipate the project will have on instructors and students?

The research tells us that active, inclusive teaching practices can advance student learning for all students. If we can give instructors the resources they need to raise the activity level in their classes, we are confident that increased student success will follow. The short-term dream is for our participating instructors to introduce some of these practices in their own classes and continue to do so into the future. The long-term dream is to provide blueprints for excellent online workshops so that organizations can increase their professional development reach within their communities.

5) How do you determine if a professional development program is effective?

The OPEN Math project is a collaboration between the MAA and the Ethnography & Evaluation Research unit at the University of Colorado - Boulder. Led by Sandra Laursen, the E&ER team has many years of experience evaluating professional development programs, primarily (but not exclusively) in face-to-face settings. A big part of the OPEN Math project will be that team figuring out how to answer precisely this question. For a start, each workshop sets its own learning objectives, and we can evaluate whether these have been met. Evaluation team members also observe each workshop directly for a large percentage of the time, another advantage of online delivery. This allows us to factor in specific components of the workshops, which we might miss from simple surveys. In the future, we will also be evaluating whether participating instructors continue to implement the workshop material in subsequent years.

6) Tell us about the people involved in the project.

This project was originally my brainchild, so I get to be the bureaucrat-in-chief. My professional development background is mostly in course specific workshops, with emphasis on discrete mathematics and technology. Through his foundational work with the Academy of Inquiry Based Learning (https://www.inquirybasedlearning.org/), Stan Yoshinobu is not only the master of pedagogy-focused workshops, he also has a great deal of experience helping other people create their own workshops. His team is instrumental in getting our new leaders to think carefully about how they deliver their workshop, particularly in light of lessons we have learned from past workshops. Sandra Laursen’s group at Boulder are rock stars when it comes to evaluating and providing feedback on this kind of work. We also have very accomplished people serving in advisory capacities, representing a broad array of mathematicians and helping us stay connected to the different parts of the community we are serving. Finally, the MAA staff on the project have a lot of experience with the logistics of registration, communication, and technical delivery. They do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes, and none of this would work without them.

Learn more about NSF DUE (#) 211260

Full Project Name: Collaborative Research: Online Professional Enhancement and Capacity Building for Instructional Practices in Undergraduate Mathematics

Abstract Link: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2111260&HistoricalAwards=false

Project Contact:  Douglas Ensley (Principal Investigator)
dougensley@gmail.com