Introduction: A Continuous Professional Learning and Development (CPLD) Framework for Online Teaching

ABSTRACT

One of the key outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been to move fully online teaching from a niche activity to the mainstream within higher education. This has required a radical rethinking of how higher education institutions support their faculty to develop their online teaching practice. In this introductory chapter, we discuss the reasons why continuing professional learning and development (CPLD) has never been more important in helping instructors who are new to online teaching to develop the requisite competencies and strategies to work effectively in this domain, as well as to support experienced teachers in refreshing and extending their online teaching practice. We acknowledge that there is no universally accepted approach to CPLD for online teaching and that diverse approaches are needed to address wide-ranging development requirements, such as staff capabilities, pedagogies and course design needs related to associated disciplinary and institutional practices. We present a CPLD model to capture these diverse sources of support, which forms the organising framework for this book. This model provides an overview of the different sources of learning development that are available to online instructors – both within and outside the teaching institution – and how they are interrelated and interconnected as part of a wider ecology of CPLD support to staff. We explain how these different sources of support may be combined to support personalised learning development pathways in online teaching practice. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.