A Prospective Study on the Application of MOOC in Teacher Professional Development in China

Abstract

Teacher professional development is the process of constantly strengthening professional attainment, broadening academic knowledge, enhancing the professional skills, and improving teaching ability. With the reform of learning science and the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the traditional mode of teacher professional development is confronted with challenge, and the new emerging MOOC system provides a new path for teacher professional development. The MOOC system is an important tool for teacher professional development because of teacher's professional characteristics, teacher's needs, and the cost of promotion. The application of MOOC system to teacher professional development, however, is still in the trial stage, and we need to carry on emphatically analysis on the policy, quality and value of the application of MOOC to teacher professional development. Coursera carried out projects of teacher professional development actively, and developed a series of teacher education curricula in cooperation with institutions of higher education and social culture institutions, which can be regarded as the pioneer and model in the field. At present, the application of MOOC system to teacher professional development is still in the stage of empiricism studies, and data-driven research in this field is needed, so as to deal with various potential obstacles, overcome different difficulties and solve possible problems.