authoring courses in Educator's academy

Education reform efforts and teacher training organizations are seemingly everywhere, but shrunken school budgets for release time, sub shortages, and district travel bans keep even the best ideas and practices from getting shared. In person training events are expensive and hard to scale. Virtual training struggle to engage and connect with participants.

Educator's Academy's unique approach that blends high quality digital content with local capacity building allows great practices to be shared at scale while personalizing the adult learning experience to the school and teachers participating. 

Relying on in person training events limits your impact to your ability to deliver them. Publishing a course on Educator's Academy means you can impact an unlimited number educators and students across the globe. And best of all, you can do that without the hassles of traveling to schools.

Relying on half-day, full-day, or even week-long drive-by training events to meaningfully change teacher behavior at scale goes against what we know is best for learners of all ages. Effective professional development is not an event, it's a process. Educator's Academy courses are designed to span longer periods of time and build in cycles of learning, practice, reflection, and refinement to create a sustained professional development experience in a way that is both effective and cost effective.

We've identified three course models for digital learning experiences and our platform supports them all.

1. Individual self-paced courses designed for targeted interventions and technical learning. 
2. Expert-facilitated courses that have a teacher, a start and end date, and allow for interaction with other participants. 
3. Collaborative self-facilitated courses that provide not only the course content, but the guidance and materials to allow a local facilitator to engage in collaborative work with their staff (i.e. shared sense making, deeper dives, critical friends activities, etc.). 

It’s this last category we're most excited about because it addresses the limitations of self-paced courses and the logistical challenges of flying in an expert to conduct training.

Educator's Academy leverages Dawn, a digital course technology developed by Agilix, that allows for the creation of video-centric courses that can reach learners anywhere. in addition to video content, course authors can included dozens of interaction types to help the learner check their understanding including flash cards, sorting activities, labelled graphics activities, and traditional quizzing. Dawn can even translate your course into other languages. To learn more about Dawn's course authoring features, click here.

While taking a course as an individual can be valuable, taking a course as part of a school- or district-based cohort can be much more powerful and effective. Educator's Academy platform allows for a local facilitator to monitor participant progress and act as a guide for the learning process without having to be a content expert. A school, department, or grade level could decide to purchase enrollments in bulk and use the course as the foundation for a shared professional growth experience.