Training In-Service Teachers to Do Action Research in Educational Technology

Abstract

We describe the implementation and evaluation of a large-scale, distance mode, training workshop in Research Methods in Educational Technology (ET), for in-service engineering college teachers in India. The goal of the workshop was to prepare the teachers to conduct action research in their courses. The workshop consisted of 4 stages: i) pre-workshop assignment, ii) main workshop with two days of synchronous sessions on RM concepts, and a week in between of asynchronous hands-on activities, iii) 2-week post-workshop final assignment and iv) mentoring to conduct a research study. A total of 3896 teachers participated in the workshop, with 1141 (29%) participants completing at least 50% of the assignments. To evaluate the effectiveness of the workshop, we conducted a study with pre-post research design. We found that learning gains from the pre-to the post-test were statistically significant. We administered a questionnaire to determine participants' learning perception and satisfaction from the workshop and found that a majority of responses (>90%) were favourable.