In recent years, it has been recognized that for teacher training to become more effective in producing real changes to classroom practices, it ought to promote professional development opportunities that are cumulative and sustained over the career of a teacher (Joubert and Surtherland 2009). The financial and logistic difficulties of engaging teachers in face-to-face professional development opportunities, as well as the need for professional development that can fit with teachers’ busy schedules and can draw on powerful resources often not available locally, have encouraged the creation of online teacher professional development programs (Dede et al. 2006).
Numerous initiatives in online teacher professional development are underway. Distance education is a useful framework for teacher training, but it can represent a large variety of pedagogical perspectives. The most common approach is to provide teacher training and support mainly through a well-designed and predefined course package. The consequence of such an approach is that distance education could potentially be very authoritarian, with pre-packaged course material that could present only a particular perspective (Simpson 2002).
The expansion, however, in the modes of communication enabled by recent advances in communications and information technologies is revolutionizing distance education, and is driving the development of support-led rather than package-led forms of distance learning. The appearance of a variety of new tools and technologies fostering computersupported collaborative learning is leading to the development of new forms of online professional development settings, in accord with socioconstructivist views of learning (Vygotsky 1978).
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