It’s been coming. Experts and schools are increasingly looking for online courses for teachers and educators to support their professional development.
Partly, it’s a question of time: many teachers are overwhelmed with their everyday tasks and ever-increasing duties. In that case, studying at home whenever you have suitable time slot feels like a feasible thing to do. Partly, it’s a question of finding a training that meets precisely your needs (and the training you actually need, is not necessarily something that is available in your own town or county).
Developing education has also become more global. Teachers have realized that we can look for new ideas not only from experts in our own country, but from other countries as well. When technology makes it possible, we can benchmark educational ideas and solutions more easily from other countries as well.
Even though this has been a growing trend for a while, Covid-19 put a huge boost to it. Suddenly we were not able to take part in in-service teacher training event in our own school, school district or town. All of a sudden we were also struggling with totally new challenges – distance teaching and how to promote learning remotely – that very few of us were properly prepared for. In lock-down situation, we turned online for various needs and purposes – why not for professional development opportunities as well?
In Learning Scoop, we have been training teachers for years, or to be exact, for decades 😉. We have organized face-to-face training events and programs, hands-on workshops, professional congresses, educational fairs, professional study tours for teachers and education experts etc. We are huge proponents of face-to-face interaction and experience.
Pandemic put us to a totally new position, too. For years we have been asked to produce online courses of the themes we usually train teachers. We always felt that we did not have time for it – and that something would be missing if we turned the trainings online. How can you replace human interaction and face-to-face sharing?
Pandemic made us realize that online courses are about providing people more opportunities.
Online courses are a great choice for you who don’t have the time or the opportunity to travel far to learn about a specific topic. Online courses can also be the only choice for you to avoid expensive trainings far away. Furthermore, online courses give you the opportunity to tailor training packages that better suit your needs.
We realized that it’s not the question of choosing either face-to-face trainings or online courses, but to have the opportunity for both.
Initially we planned to open a web shop for our own online courses. We soon realized that this might not serve our customers the best. We realized that there were plenty of other quality online courses of Finnish education and pedagogical practices that would complement the selection perfectly. By offering the variety of unique courses we could meet different needs.
It’s been a true pleasure to discover what kind of great courses other experts have produced! We have courses that dive deep into some specific theme, like sustainable development in education or how to teach coding. We have courses with very practical tips and examples to try out yourself (check for instance courses for Positive Parenting). In addition, we have courses that lead you to the very foundation of Finnish education and pedagogy, Cornerstones of Finnish Education. We hope you enjoy the self-study online courses for teachers and educators!
Now it’s your time to be the explorer! What would you like to learn more about? Check out the online course selection and build your own professional development path. Welcome onboard!
