Empowering Academic Tutors Through Professional Development to Create Effective Online Learning Environments
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic served both as a challenge and a moment for higher education opportunity programs (HEOPs) to innovate professional development programming for learning facilitators who expressed a desire to expand their knowledge-base while serving as a compass for their students whose learning was disrupted without warning. Consequently, two HEOP programs within a community college and senior college collaborated to create a virtual professional learning community that allowed learning facilitators to maintain high-quality professional development throughout the pandemic. This qualitative study used the Kirkpatrick Model as the theoretical framework to explore the strategies used by HEOPs before and during the pandemic to determine effective and efficient strategies within academic support centers using a virtual learning environment. As a result, this study found the most effective and efficient strategies used by HEOP academic support centers are those that maintain regular and consistent professional development opportunities for part-time Learning Facilitators.