Acceptance of Webinars for Professional Development Purposes

Running head: DISSERTATION PROPOSAL
Acceptance of Webinars for Professional Development Purposes
Ali Saghir

DISSERTATION PROPOSAL
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY
Introduction
Research on professional development has contributed to our understanding of how
teachers learn and improve their practice through PD. According to Vu, Cao, Vu and Cepero
(2014), professional development is the process of learning and ensuring that one's area of
expertise is kept up-to-date, both for career advancement and personal development. Individuals
that are interested in professional development are usually inclined to improve their ability and
strengths as well as enhancing their work in terms of lifelong learning. Persellin and Goodrick
(2010) explain that faculty development includes teachers' training, which most of the time is
considered pre-service. However, in most instances, faculty professional development involves
on-going learning for the professional educators. The learning may be in-service, or it may take
place out of work. Lancaster, Stein, MacLean, Van Amburgh, and Persky (2014) illustrate that
faculty development programs in various institutions vary in regard to the function and structure.
Professional development might be a key to success to the faculty members who teach online.
Faculty members who have had little to no online experiences are often asked to teach online and
they are faced with the challenge of converting their traditional courses to the online formats
(Bousbahi&Alrazgan, 2015). When planning for the faculty development, organizations should
also take into the consideration the unique elements which are associated to the online
environment. According to Shahdad & Shirazin, (2012) highlighted that strategies that are used
to prepare instructors to teach online substantively vary from the strategies which are used for
teaching face to face.
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DISSERTATION PROPOSAL
Key situational factors in faculty professional development include campus resources,
financial support, local expertise, human resources, and the interest of the staff members
(Bousbahi&Alrazgan, 2015). The busy schedule that is popular in faculty members' line of work
has led to the need for professional development. Due to this need, online teacher professional
development has become popular (Vu, Cao, Vu & Cepero, 2014). Online professional
development (OPD) has allowed teachers flexibility in their work through various forms such as
participating in video conferencing, distance learning classrooms, as well as enabling
asynchronous courses. This negates the need for the participants of a particular course to be
available at the same time. Given the increasingly popular trend of online professional
development and the significance of professional development for teachers, OPD will continue
to garner significance and popularity over the coming years. Online professional development
opportunities and research on them has significantly increased with the development of the
online resources in education (Bousbahi&Alrazgan, 2015). One of the significant attributes of
the online environment has been the availability of tracking as well as recording user interaction
through click-track data collection. This particular data has some promising implication to the
online PD environment where our understanding of the teacher engagement along with the
efficiency delivery of and the interactions with the content could improve by looking at the
online behavior of the users.
The use of the web-based tools such as Webinars has been utilized for the educational
purposes which has seen a dramatic increase in the last two decades as the internet access, web
based applications has grown ( Allen & Seaman, 2013). This growth has also been observed in
professional development training and the research as benefits of the asynchronous online
training which has led to many online professional development programs (Dede, Ketelhut,
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DISSERTATION PROPOSAL
Whitehouse, Breit, & McCloskey, 2009). The research on the professional development has
contributed to individual understanding how the teachers learn and improve their practices
through professional development. nonetheless, not all the professional development research
offers meaningful data since the research design are not rigorous enough to show the connections
that exists between the professional development practice and the improvement of the learners
and the teacher outcomes.
The online learning environments, uses collaborative tools such as Webinar tools which
are designed as instructional technology tool for addressing various educational needs(Chin,
Sum, & Foon, 2008; Jarosewich et al., 2010; Theoret & Luna, 2009; Topcu & Ubuz, 2008; Zhao
& McDougall, 2008). According to Chin et al. (2008) the online tools such as Webinars can help
the learners and improve on their literacy skills. As the Webinar tools are replacing face to face
interaction through written message, the learners’ motivation to write could become better and
increase on their efforts to grasp more knowledge and skills through this learning environment.
Incorporating of the online tools such as Webinar could influence the learner’s knowledge, skills,
perception, attitude and their expectations in online learning (Bousbahi&Alrazgan, 2015).
Studies have shown that the online tools could serve as a satisfactory purpose to learning as
compared to the traditional method used such as conference meeting (Bassett, 2011; Yeh &
Lahman, 2007). Using Webinar tool, the participants are able to share the audio, documents and
applications with the webinar attendees (Elliott et al, 2015Malik et al., 2015). Currently, many of
the webinar services provide a live stream option or even the ability to record. This tool is useful
in the professional development of the faculty to advance on their knowledge and skills (Al-Jarf,
2012; Harrison, 2014;Khechine, Lakhal, Pascot&Bytha, 2014; Yates, 2014). Most importantly,
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