You have just browsed the SABES calendar for next month's professional development opportunities at calendar.sabes.org. You see some great courses and workshops that you would love to take, but once again... you can't. If only they were offered at times when you could take them!

Suppose adult education professional development courses were available when it was convenient for you, with expert facilitators; suppose they included some short work-shops and some longer study groups, courses, or projects; and suppose you could take these from your computer at work or at home. Such a possibility is not far off. In some states—and to some extent in Massachusetts—it is possible now.

Will I Even Like e-Learning?
You may wonder, am I the sort of person who would like learning online? To find out, try "Is eLearning Right for You?" It's a free, quick, online assessment of technology/distance learning skills and attitudes, and it will give you immediate results. Go to www.vto.vt.edu/survey.php.

But, you may ask, isn't distance learning just documents to be read on the Web? Sometimes, yes, but not always. Increasingly there are whole courses, with an instructor, assignments, discussions (often in real time through Internet chats or telephone conference calls, but also in discussion boards). Sometimes credit is offered. There are free, short (under an hour) workshops online for volunteers and others, for example, at Verizon Literacy Campus (www.vluonline.org) and whole master's degree programs with graduate level online courses, for example, at: www.worldcampus.psu.edu/wc/MasterinAdultEducation.shtml.

In between, there are "pure" online distance learning courses with no face-to-face contact, and "hybrid" or "blended" courses that begin and end with face-to-face contact and have most of the courses online. There are also face-to-face courses that have an "extended" or "supplemental" online component.

AE Pro Online
There are adult education professional development courses offered online for a modest fee by AE Pro Online Professional Development (midwestlincs.org/aepro). This site is sponsored by the Center for Literacy Studies at the University of Tennessee and the Ohio Literacy Resource Center. Courses include, among others: ESOL Basics; Introduction to Learning; Disabilities in Adults; Integrating Technology in the Classroom; Teaching Adults to Use Mathematics to Solve Problems and Communicate.

They also offer an assessment course with former SABES assessment staff member, Marie Cora. A six-week course here is $149.00. A state can also buy seats in these courses for its teachers.

ESOL Specific
But suppose you teach ESOL: Is there something especially for you? You could try ESL Civics link at: civicslink.ket.org/login.xml

It's an online professional development program for adult education ESOL/ESL teachers. $90.00 per teacher for six months. Or you could try TESOL's Online Education Programs at www.tesol.org.

The Web site of the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) is www.ncte.org/store/learning/116665.htm. Its menu includes the online program called CoLEARN ESL. This online inquiry model is designed to promote professional development for ESL teachers. Through a structured yet flexible series of readings and writings, teachers are expected to reflect on their own beliefs about ESOL/ESL instruction, learn new strategies, and investigate how students respond best to various approaches.

ESL CoLEARN
ESL CoLEARN provides teachers with a number of options for their professional development, including the following:

• Professional readings with over 2,000 full-text articles from NCTE and TESOL's many journals and books, searchable by title, author, or topic of inquiry.
• Reading invitations and writing engagements invite teachers to read and respond to a specific prompt about some aspect of ESL pedagogy.
• Online communities provide teachers with the opportunity to discuss their readings, writings, and reflections on teaching with interested teachers in their own school or across the country.
• Conversations with prominent writers, composition scholars, and teachers offer participants an opportunity to ask questions and learn from some of the most exciting professionals in the field.

Online Courses for Your Students: Distance Learning 101 and Beyond
Suppose you want to learn how to organize an online course for your students. In collaboration with project IDEAL (a multistate distance learning project) SABES offers Distance Learning 101 and Distance Learning 102. As Jennifer Rafferty, SABES ABE/Distance Learning Coordinator describes them:

"Distance Learning 101 is a six-to-eight week 'course' in planning to teach at a distance. Participants spend about two hours per week working on exercises designed to guide their planning for this new activity. The state's trainer/facilitator reads and reacts to each exercise and facilitates an asynchronous discussion of each week's topic among all the participants."

"For example, one exercise asks each participant to develop a curriculum for a face-to-face orientation for prospective distance learners. After viewing all the exercises the trainer might post a discussion topic like this: 'will you accept anyone that applies for your distance program or will you be selective and take only those students with the highest likelihood of succeeding? What indicators would you use to identify those most likely to succeed?' Staff from the same literacy center are encouraged to work on the exercises together."

The Web site looks different from Blackboard or WebCT, which are built on an expert-novice model of instruction. The Project IDEAL professional development model is one of community-building. We want teachers to feel they are professionals exploring a new area of skill development and getting assistance from fellow professionals, not guidance from a "sage on the stage." All the exercises ask participants to develop a plan-for recruitment, orientation, teaching and assessment of distance learners. The trainer's role is to get all of the participants in the course to provide constructive criticism of each other's plan. The textbook (Handbook of Distance Education for Adult Learners) is a handbook with the collected wisdom of teachers in many states on these very topics. The handbook is revised each year with new tips from participating teachers.

Distance Learning 102: Study Groups
This second professional development course is for teachers with one-year experience teaching at a distance. Having mastered the mechanics of distance, teachers are ready to think in a more focused way about pedagogy. Each participant develops a case study of a difficult pedagogical problem. The essence of the study group is having the study group members examine the cases one at a time, practicing the art of asking questions that further probe the nature of the problem and developing strategies to deal with the learner's difficulties. Essence of a sample case study: "I have a student who is having a difficult time in ratios and wants to practice at home, and I'm having a hard time 'talking' to him online to explain the procedures."

There are other online free professional development opportunities, some of which have been around for nearly a decade and others that are brand new. Do you know about the National Institute for Literacy Electronic Discussion lists? Assessment, learning disabilities, women and literacy, poverty, race and literacy, technology, and others will be found at www.nifl.gov/lincs/discussions.

You can sign up—or later unsubscribe—there. These are communities of practice for a wide variety of adult education teachers around the country. There is also a public policy discussion list, sponsored by the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education, the National Literacy Advocacy list. To subscribe to this, go to www.aaace.org and select the AAACE-NLA list link.

Wiki
A new technology on the block is the Wiki. (Wiki-wiki means "quick-quick" in Hawaiian street jargon). At the Adult Literacy Education Wiki you can find questions other teachers have asked - and in many cases answered - from research and professional wisdom. And because it's a wiki, you can add in your own wisdom "quick-quick." To get there, go to wiki.literacytent.org. Once there, be sure to subscribe so you can add your ideas.

SABES, too, has begun to plan for more professional development online, and in the two-and-a-half years you can expect to see more online and blended courses. This would be a good time to let your SABES Regional Support Center field technologist or director know what courses you would like to see offered.

David Rosen is the former director of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute/Greater Boston SABES Regional Support Center. He is now the director of Newsome Associates in Jamaica Plain. He can be reached at: djrosen@comcast.net