Technology-Enabled Learning Support for Teachers

About This Course

By and large, research on teacher professional development / in-service education shows that traditional practices of workshop-based training are inadequate for making significant changes in teaching practice or implementing policy and pedagogical reforms. The availability of mobile messaging and social media apps makes it possible to provide continuous pedagogical support based on teachers' practice and context to enhance professional development.

The South Asian context is diverse and requires innovations to scale to improve the overall quality of education, in which teachers play a critical and central role. This course aims to develop an understanding of how teachers can be supported at scale through a practice-based professional development pedagogy, developing teachers' professional identity and creating knowledge-building communities for professional teacher learning by nurturing online teacher communities of practice.

Course Objectives

Engage with and apply core concepts such as professional identity, teacher professional knowledge, pedagogy for learning related to teachers to build and nurture teacher communities of practice

Analyse and synthesize core concepts related to teacher professional development with features and technological, pedagogical and social affordances of technology tools/apps to develop technology-enabled online platforms for teacher learning and support

Integrate ideas of teacher professional development, teacher learning, teacher change and organizational learning to develop technology-enabled solutions for continuous teacher support and professional development at scale

Course Staff

Dr Bindu Ramdas Thirumalai, Assistant Professor, Mumbai Campus, Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education

Bindu is an Assistant Professor at the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education(CETE), TISS, Mumbai. She has completed her PhD, MPhil and MA degrees in Education from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and a Masters degree in computer applications (MCA) from Bangalore University.

Her PhD from TISS is an action research study on Teachers’ Communities of Practice. Over 400 mathematics teachers teaching in government high schools in Telangana State participated in the online community of practice that she managed for over two years.

She teaches the advanced specialisation course - Teacher Education and the Education Research Methods course for the MA Education and BEd-MEd programmes at TISS.

Bindu has over ten years of field experience facilitating in-service teacher programmes operating at scale in government high school contexts. She co-conceptualised and coordinated the short-term certificate programme ‘Reflective Teaching with ICT’ (RTICT)' offered in an online or blended mode for teacher’s professional development from its inception in 2017 to 2020. She has designed and developed MOOC based courses on ICT and Education, Mentoring for Teacher Professional Development and Action Research as a part of the RTICT programme.

Bindu’s areas of interest are Teacher Education, Education Technology, Pedagogy of Programming Higher Education Pedagogy and Design Thinking in Education.

Through her multidisciplinary academic background in education and computer science, Bindu is keen to innovate scalable teacher professional development models leveraging ICT meaningfully.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I access the course on a smartphone?

You can access the course via TISSx app on your smartphone. You can install the app from Playstore.

Whom do I contact for further information?

Email at: maet@clixindia.org

What web browser should I use?

The Open edX platform works best with current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or with Internet Explorer version 9 and above. See our list of supported browsers for the most up-to-date information.

CETE-TISS: MAET-ETS01 Technology-Enabled Learning Support for Teachers