Teacher Professional Development (TPD) at Scale

• Declaration on TPD@Scale
• Primer on TPD@Scale Coalition for the Global South – Updated 25 July 2018
• MOOCs as an Alternative for Teacher Professional Development: Examining Learner Persistence in One Chinese MOOC – This initiative demonstrates how a developing country could use digital learning technology to promote education equity, quality, and efficiency through a large-scale teacher professional development (TPD@Scale) approach. Prof. Qiong Wang of Peking University and her colleagues from 10 universities have worked to provide 20 high-quality MOOCs to over 1 million teachers in China since 2015.

Scaling

• Millions Learning – The Millions Learning project seeks to identify where and how education interventions are scaling quality learning for children and youth in low- and middle-income countries around the world.
• Millions Learning Report – These case studies focus on a range of topics—from teacher development to financial literacy to early grade reading to technological innovation—each unpacking the factors behind their expansion and increased scope of impact, with the ultimate goal of offering valuable insight to help current and future education interventions expand access and improve education quality for children and youth around the world.
• Millions Learning Scaling Case Studies – These case studies focus on a range of topics—from teacher development to financial literacy to early grade reading to technological innovation—each unpacking the factors behind their expansion and increased scope of impact, with the ultimate goal of offering valuable insight to help current and future education interventions expand access and improve education quality for children and youth around the world.
• Millions Learning Real-time Scaling Labs: Designing an adaptive learning process to support large-scale change in education – Millions Learning, a project of the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, addresses the question of how to scale quality education for all children and youth. CUE is launching Real-time Scaling Labs in partnership with local institutions in a number of countries and U.S. cities to generate more evidence and provide practical recommendations around the process of scaling in global education, encouraging a stronger link between research and practice. These labs are not physical spaces, but rather a process established by CUE and partner institutions to learn from, support, and document existing efforts to scale interventions focused on improving children’s learning as they unfold in real-time. This will include observing, gathering, and analyzing data, as well as encouraging self-reflection, recommending course corrections based on existing evidence, documenting the scaling process in real-time, and sharing ongoing learning with those involved. The ultimate goal is to support initiatives as they scale while simultaneously gaining deeper insight into how policymakers, civil society, and the private sector can most effectively work together to bring about large-scale transformation in the quality of children’s learning and their development.
• Management Systems International, “Scaling Up – From Vision to Large-Scale Change, A Management Framework for Practitioners” – This document is intended to be a companion document to the Scaling Up TOOLKIT. With support from the MacArthur Foundation and the Packard Foundation, both documents were developed, applied, and refined over a nine year period with twenty‐two projects in India, Mexico, and Nigeria. An earlier version of this document was published in March of 2006.
• Expandnet, “Nine steps for developing a scaling-up strategy” – The present guide is one of the ExpandNet resource materials that have been developed over the past several years. Its main purpose is to facilitate systematic planning for scaling up. It is intended for programme managers, researchers and technical support agencies who are seeking to scale up health service innovations that have been tested in pilot projects or other field tests and proven successful.
• Expandnet, “Worksheets for developing a scaling-up strategy” – These worksheets are to be used in conjunction with the ExpandNet/WHO document entitled Nine steps for developing a scaling-up strategy.
• International Development Innovation Alliance, “Scaling innovation: Good practices guide for funders” – This paper in the IDIA Insights series focuses on eight good practices for funders seeking to take promising development innovations to scale. It is designed to accompany the Insights on Scaling Innovation paper that draws on the experience and learning of a wide range of bilateral, multilateral, philanthropic and civil society actors who came together in a Working Group on Scaling Innovation facilitated by the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA).
• International Development Innovation Alliance, “Insights on scaling innovation” – This paper in the IDIA Insights series focuses on various challenges, lessons learned and practices of funders seeking to take promising development innovations to scale. It draws on the experience and learning of a wide range of bilateral, multilateral, philanthropic and civil society actors who came together in a Working Group on Scaling Innovation facilitated by the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA).
• Brookings Institution, “Getting to scale: How to bring development solutions to millions of poor people” – Getting to Scale explores what it takes to expand the reach of development solutions beyond an individual village or pilot program so they serve poor people everywhere. Each chapter documents one or more contemporary case studies, which together provide a body of evidence on how scale can be pursued.
• Nesta, “Making it big: Strategies for scaling social innovations” – This report aims to help social innovators think through the best scaling options for them. It looks at how others have developed their scaling strategies, reflects on the benefits and challenges of different options, and shows how social innovators have tackled these in reality.

Learning at Scale

• Learning analytics for the Global South – Learning Analytics for the Global South considers how the collection, analysis, and use of data about learners and their contexts have the potential to broaden access to quality education and improve the efficiency of educational processes and systems in developing countries around the world.
• More about MOOCs and developing countries – The New York Times famously labeled 2012 the ‘year of the MOOC’, acknowledging the attention and excitement generated by a few high profile ‘massive open online courses’ which enrolled tens of thousands of students from all of the world to participate in offerings from a few elite universities in the United States. This article offers 10 observations and comments about MOOCs and developing countries.
• TASCHA study on MOOCs in developing countries reveals half of users receive certification – The report is a culmination of the research done as part of the Advancing MOOCs for Development Initiative.

Other Resources

• UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report 2016 – The Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report by UNESCO shows the potential for education to propel progress towards all global goals outlined in the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs). It also shows that education needs a major transformation to fulfill that potential and meet the current challenges facing humanity and the planet.
• UNESCO Institute for Statistics Fact Sheet – The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released the first-ever estimates of how many teachers are needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
• Digital learning for developing Asian countries: Achieving equity, quality, and efficiency in education – This chapter addresses the question of adoption through the optics of three interlocking goals in education: equity, quality, and efficiency (EQE). The chapter begins by outlining EQE, followed by a discussion of four modes of digital learning – massive open online courses (MOOCs), intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), digital game-based learning (DGBL), and learning analytics (LA) – as potential enablers of greater equity, enhanced quality, and improved efficiency in education systems in developing countries. Issues of effectiveness, sustainability, and scalability, as well as key research gaps, are also highlighted.