Along with the ever-shifting and evolving challenges in education, particularly due to the ongoing worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, comes an urgent need to fully investigate the existing literature to recalibrate instructor's e-practices to function optimally online by finding e-avenues to overcome issues related to e-pedagogy. In this chapter, the authors initially lay the theoretical underpinning of both massive open online courses (MOOCs) and continuous professional development (CPD) e-programs. They subsequently propose a framework that fuses these two entities and thus showcase its potential catalyst effect in re-skilling academic practitioners in general and secondary level instructors in particular to up-grade their e-savoir-faire that is tightly related to promoting engaging and motivating e-teaching-learning experiences for their digitally-tethered 21st-century learners. They conclude by spotlighting the future implication of such a pragmatic and practical (e)-solution in nationwide and local-bound contexts.
TopIntroduction
The sudden and unexpected onset of the covid 19 pandemic pushed educators to rethink teaching and learning and thus engage in the process of trial and error to ensure students’ (e)-education continuity as they were obliged to operate in-house and in a full or partial online environment. Evidently, neither students nor teachers were prepared to function efficiently in these online-only arenas as they faced a wide set of challenges, especially in developing countries like Algeria. These challenges ranged from a lack of sufficient infrastructure like internet and computers (Mbongo et al., 2021), online assessment (Kamal & Illiyan, 2021) to motivation (Hassan, 2020) and lack of e-skills (Akram et al., 2021).
In this perilous time of the worldwide pandemic, teachers were in dire need of professional development, but because of the physical contact constraints (De Boer, 2021), a great deal of them, if not all, did not receive proper training to up-grade their e-savoir-faire to deliver an optimal online learning-teaching ride for their students (Castro-Castro et al., 2020; Tsegay et al., 2022). Many self-driven (e.g., Al-Jarf, 2021; Poce et al., 2021) and/or ministry-led initiatives (e.g., Parsons et al., 2019; Eddy et al., 2021) have been witnessed that attempted to palliate this problem and receive online professional development courses to enrich their e-pedagogical repertoire. In Algeria, most of these initiatives were reported at the tertiary level (Baghdadi, 2023; Saihi & Khider, 2023) but are significantly scarce at the secondary level.
One of the most promising e-pathways that can be leveraged in Algeria, in particular, and in developing countries, in general, is MOOC-based CPD, which is the core of this conceptual paper. Granted, this is not new. It has been leveraged prior (Castaño-Muñoz et al., 2018) and during the pandemic (Sia & Cheriet, 2019) but not at a secondary level in the Algerian context and certainly not in a systematic fashion. For that, this conceptual chapter proposes a conceptual framework with which policy- and decision-makers can utilize to implement a holistic and complementary MOOC-based continuous professional development that can benefit, to a large extent, both teachers and students at the secondary level. Framed upon this reasoning, the present research aims to:
- 1.
Review the literature on MOOCs, CPD, and the beneficial impact of their merger.
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Present a conceptual framework that can implement practically this e-solution in the Algerian context and beyond.
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Highlight the implications of the conceptual framework and future directions of the study.