Hey Maddie, you are making complete sense 🙂 And I agree completely on importance of teachers experiencing blended learning as learners first. We plan to design our course as blended itself for that reasons (and are against making it self-paced because we feel they can benefit from the interactivity which is essential and closer to how they might develop their own courses). So they’ll have that experience. But of course a prof dev course is not really like a for-credit undergrad or grad course.

So RE: building learning experiences vs teach tech, I agree completely. That’s where the links like Chris Friend’s article is good: it is about doing writing portfolios, for peer review, for assessment and reflection – and then google docs is just one way of doing it. They could have been totally offline…

Aaand responding to your comment just gave me a brainstorm to something i should have noticed earlier: we cannot know in advance which readings case studies tools etc will benefit our group of teachers. We need to meet them, understand their teaching philosophies, current practices, aspirations, etc., and from there help them find what others have been doing to convert some of their activities or assessments to online. It is sometimes useful to introduce them to pedagogies they might not use immediately, but I think they’ll benefit more if most of what they learn can go into their courses immediately. We might be able to tell a little about their philosophies, etc. from their applications to join the course, and this would affect how we design the skeleton of the course as well.

Thanks, Maddie! This has helped a lot