K-12 teacher professional development courses come in a wide variety of forms, but perhaps some of the most innovative and accessible to busy teachers are more than 45 courses developed by the Learning To Teach with Technology Studio (LTTS) from the Indiana University School of Education. Each LTTS course is provided in an online, self-paced format and include a one-on-one facilitator/mentor.

As noted on its Web site, "LTTS is a Web-based professional development system that helps teachers learn how to integrate technology into their classroom teaching. We use a problem-centered instructional format and encourage teachers to develop inquiry-based instruction for their classrooms. . . Courses are based on ISTE NETS standards, connect directly to state and national content standards (as appropriate), and are developed by experienced teachers."

To date, more than 600 students, who are primarily in-service teachers who are also graduate students, have taken these courses. A smaller percentage are pre-service teachers. Overall, these students have come from 30 states and seven foreign countries, and the majority are Indiana University graduate students.

Each course can earn students one Indiana University graduate-level credit, or 15 certification renewal units, (CRUs) or 15 continuing education units (CEUs).

Started with a $1.5 million FIPSE-LAPP grant in 1999, LTTS research thus far shows that the commonly held notion that emphasizes the importance of interaction and community-building between students in online-learning environments may not always be so important. For example, LTTS classes are anytime, anyplace, and any pace within a 12-week time frame, and the full extent of interaction is one-on-one with a mentor only via e-mail. According to Project Director Tom Duffy, 94 percent of LTTS students surveyed said that the ability to move at their own pace was important; 93 percent said that the facilitator was a big help in their learning process; and only 27 percent of LTTS students surveyed said they would prefer going through these courses with other students as a class. Also, 90 percent of students surveyed said that they expect to use, or have already used, the projects developed in the LTTS courses in their classroom.

Duffy says the LTTS format fits well within the typically busy lives of teachers. "We focused on making these courses accessible to teachers. Teachers need flexibility that goes beyond the traditional sort of online course that follows a schedule." Teachers can take these classes anytime that is convenient for them as opposed to being forced into enrolling at times during the school year when their availability is limited. The cost is right, too, with a tuition price of only $75 per course. Students who want to earn one credit of graduate-level work from Indiana University must pay an additional $204.50. Courses can take on average of 15 to 20 hours to complete.

In addition to accessibility and flexibility, Duffy explains that "relevance" was the other key factor taken into account when developing these courses. "We wanted professional development that was really going to support teachers in their schools. All of these courses start with a curriculum problem and end with a lesson plan. It’s a guided problem-based learning approach. We support teachers in thinking about issues as they work toward a curriculum solution."

As aforementioned, all of the LTTS courses help teachers learn how to integrate technology into their teaching. "That’s the core of it," says Duffy, "but other things are becoming equally important. All of the courses also focus on how to design inquiry lessons and how to use technology as a vehicle for student inquiry. We also worry about curriculum standards. So, as teachers go through the courses, we have them identify their state or the national standards they are addressing in their lesson plans. We also worry about competency-based assessment. So, every course has anywhere from five to seven guided steps in the process, and each step calls for an assignment submission to the mentor."

The mentors are all former teachers with at least five years of teaching experience. Basically, mentors grade student work, provide feedback and create an e-mail-based dialogue with students based on the work they submit. "Mentors offer suggestions from their own experiences and also suggest other resources for students to look at," says Duffy.

However, an interesting sidebar as it relates to the entire mentoring process is that the high sociability factor that higher education online learning research, in general, frequently espouses as being vital in an online class is really not so vital in the LTTS courses.

"We are doing a lot of work centered on the whole mentoring process," says Duffy. "We spend a lot of time building and evaluating tools to support mentoring simply from an efficiency point of view. We are asking what are the important things the mentor does? And there is a lot of talk about the sociability of the mentor. How important is it to have a high social environment? The research we did said it is not that important. It does not make that much of a difference. You need some base line of friendliness, but after that, the friendliness does not aid learning or motivation. Our argument is that it’s really the cognitive aspects of the course that are stimulating people, as opposed to being super friendly. So our training of mentors really focuses on how to do the cognitive kind of facilitation."

A work in progress as it relates to the mentoring process deals with developing "conversational agents" to supplement mentoring. These are pre-programmed virtual interventions that identify when, for example, a student has not adequately reviewed an online resource(s) prior to submitting an assignment. "We can have pre-specified statements that watch for certain behaviors," says Duffy, adding that "we don’t want to replace the mentor. The real person interaction is incredibly important. We do, however, want to know how we can supplement the mentor."

Another work in progress is the development of a consortium strategy whereby other universities or teacher education support units can join forces with LTTS within an LTTS application service provider (asp) model. As noted on the LTTS Web site, LTTS would house the server and administer the system while consortium members use LTTS "to meet their needs - including generating new or enhanced revenue streams. Through the LTTS license agreement, consortium members have full access to all of the LTTS tools for setting enrollment fees, managing enrollments and credit offerings, and facilitating student learning. Consortium members can also design their own LTTS courses for inclusion in the LTTS catalog and collect revenue from all uses of those courses."

Finally, LTTS is always in the process of developing new courses that meet very specific and timely needs. "We are looking into going into different areas," says Duffy. For example, a group of school superintendents in Indiana is interested in having algebraic reasoning be taught at the elementary school level. LTTS is developing a sequence of three courses geared toward helping elementary teachers get a firmer grasp on this topic and accordingly build solid lesson plans. "It is a shift from what we were doing in a sense that there is much more emphasis on content than we had, but it is the same concept - it is a curriculum problem, and how do you solve it? In this case we are spending a lot more time talking about specific frameworks, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards."

Overall, Duffy says, that LTTS courses, research and development - when taken as a whole - has "turned out to be a much better product than I would have ever imagined."