Date Published: 2022

Leung, J. (2022). Self-regulated events and actions in online teacher professional development with process mining techniques. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 23(4).

Source

Purpose of the Study

This study aimed to visualize self-regulated learning (SRL) events and actions performed by users during important periods of the school year and the COVID-19 pandemic using an online teacher professional development platform. The study analyzed the interactions between educators and PD resources, focusing on understanding educators’ priorities and information needs at the beginning of the school year and during the pandemic. The study used case- and activity-based decomposition techniques to map SRL events and actions of frequent users and all users anonymously.

Background of the Study

School administrators, teachers, and instructional staff in K-12 settings rely on online teacher professional development (PD) to seek evidence-based classroom practices to improve their leadership and teaching skills. The EdHub Library, part of the Network of Educator Effectiveness (NEE), is an online PD platform that has hosted over 500 asynchronous activities since Fall 2014. Recent studies have used process mining algorithms to analyze learners’ temporal or event data to measure SRL behaviors in online environments.

The Research

The study visualized all SRL events and actions performed by EdHub users using the pm4py algorithm in Python to parse event data during the first 30 days of the school year (2018, 2019, and 2020) and the first 90 days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Process mining techniques were implemented to visualize user profiles of frequent users in case-based decompositions and identify critical SRL events and actions of all users in event-based decompositions for three school years. SRL events and actions were measured in total pageviews.

Findings

  • Around 80% of users returned to the EdHub Library to access PD resources in the first 30 days of 2018 and 2019 academic years except for the 2020 academic year where the library has attracted additional new users.
  • During the first 90 days of the pandemic in March 2020, the entire user base returned to the EdHub Library for emergency remote teaching and learning support.
  • During the first 90 days of the pandemic, five library topic areas were accessed the most: Introduction to NEE, Beginning Teacher Support, Social-Emotional Learning, Cognitive Engagement, and Critical Thinking
  • Users showed more content-oriented behaviors than standard-oriented and search-oriented ones when selecting PD resources by navigating to specific topic areas of the library.
  • Users exhibited content-oriented behaviors that navigated linearly or cyclically between online activities within modules and across other topic areas to supplement their PD efforts.

Reflections

The study documented the initial mapping of self-regulated learning events and actions in an online professional development library primarily focused on content and standard-oriented behaviors. It also identified specific micro-level self-regulated learning processes, such as free search, goal-directed search, and re-reading, within the broader macro-level process of strategy use on a popular online platform for teacher professional development.