E-professional development is taking classes online wherever you have access to computer and internet. Class information is uploaded by the professor on a weekly basis. Students complete their class assignments, and then upload them to the internet where the professor checks and grades each assignment. Any questions and concerns will then be discussed by the professor and students online.

There are many colleges that offer e-professional developmentl. Below, I have selected one that fits the topic at hand.

 

Teachers College, Columbia University is the nation's oldest and largest graduate school of education. They offer many programs ranging from Administration of Special Education, Communication and Education to Teaching Students with dis/Abilities and Urban Education Leaders Program. The department of Mathematics, Science and Technology offers many areas of specialization. Recently, the MST department added Technology and Education to their specializations as an online masters of education (MA) degree.

TC's First Online Master's Program

A new Computing program combines quality with convenience

Communication, Computing, and Technology in Education (CCTE) provides a cluster of degree programs for students who seek to develop leadership capacities in the use of information and communication technologies in education. The program applies to all subject areas and serves students, staff, and faculty members who share a commitment as educators to use digital technologies to improve education at all levels. Work through CCTE should move simultaneously toward two poles of understanding and practice: toward a comprehensive understanding of the cultural and historical implications of new technologies for education and life and toward purposefully selecting and shaping the uses of new media in educational practice at all levels and subject areas.

CCTE’s programs deal with the many ways in which material culture changes and shapes educational practice. Listed are current assumptions about the long-term effects that innova-tions in information, communi-cation, and gaming technologies are having on education and culture. Work through CCTE should lead faculty and students to study, criticize, develop, and extend propositions such as these:

• When changes in information and communication technologies transform the ways people create, disseminate, and apply knowledge, deep changes in educational practices occur.
• Educational institutions, including schools of education, will undergo prolonged change and significant transformation, occasioned by changes in the media of intellectual production.
• Literacy practices will become more central to active participation in information networks and modern life.
• Preservice education will need to focus more on the active integration of Information Communication Technologies or ICTs into pedagogy and research.
• As digital information and communication technologies become more accessible, the separation of schools and higher education into two, largely distinct, educational cultures will markedly diminish.
• With the emerging intellectual conditions, activities contributing to the creation of knowledge will increase in relative value, while those devoted solely to its dissemination will decrease.
• Campuses will remain important foci of intellectual activity, while participation in them will become more flexible via networks supporting asynchronous, distributed involvement.
• Specialists in education will need to work closely with scholars, scientists, and professionals to embed powerful learning experiences in digital technology for advancing knowledge.
• Increasingly, educators will de-emphasize imparting a static stock of information and ideas and will instead seek to enable all people to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
• Demand for highly skilled educators will increase and preparing them will largely be a field-based engagement in situations where students interact with new knowledge resources.
• Schools and other educational institutions will increase in public importance, and the educating professions will increasingly become high-tech and high-prestige professions.
• Changes in information, gaming, and communication technologies will resuscitate the progressive movement in education, enabling it to be both broadly egalitarian and intellectually rigorous.

Communication, Computing, and Technology in Education aims to prepare students to deal with both present and future implications of new media, and to play a constructive role in shaping the educational response to innovations in information and communication technologies. Although these concerns are common to all three programs, each has distinct nuances with respect to methods and purpose:

• Communication relies primarily on social science inquiry to understand, interpret, and shape how information and communication technologies influence culture and education, including areas such as literacy and teacher education.
• Computing in Education works with computer information systems to facilitate the effective extension of digital technologies into educational practice. This strand includes within it an intensive master’s program that can be completed by students who live too far away to attend classes during the regular academic year.
• Instructional Technology and Media concentrates on the creation and application of innovative technologies, guided by a research tradition grounded in pedagogy and cognitive science, in order to make new media work as powerful tools for study and teaching.

For more infomation about Teachers College, Columbia University, please visit http://www.tc.columbia.edu/ and for the department of Mathematics, Science and Technology, goto http://www.tc.edu/mst/CCTE/detail.asp?Id=Degree+Requirements+(commencing+'08+-+'09)&Info=MA+in+Computing+in+Education