The Data Wise Online Leadership Institute (DWO) engages teams of educators and administrators in an evidence-based instructional improvement process. The week-long, intensive, online workshop integrates the flexibility and convenience of online learning with the power of co-located teams and the structure of a time-bound professional development workshop. Our internal design process yielded this unique model for scaling successful campus-based programs: the team-based design of a collaborative learning experience.
Project Objectives The Data Wise Summer Institute, offered here on campus each year for up to 25 teams of educators and school leaders from around the globe, is an extremely popular entry in the PPE Portfolio. The Data Wise Project, in concert with PPE and the TLL, recognized that travelling to Cambridge for a week is cost-prohibitive for many teacher teams and that, given the on-campus capacity, the model of the Summer Institute has a limited reach. The team sought to create a fully online counterpart to the on-campus Summer Institute while retaining the tightly collaborative, high-touch nature of the experience. The result, DWO, integrates the flexibility and convenience of online learning with the power of co-located teams and the structure of a time-bound professional development workshop in a five-day intensive for school-based teams to conduct and apply learning in their own contexts.
TLL Engagement Through a collaborative design process focused on a high-touch, team-based learning experience, the TLL created the course structure, website, videos and other multimedia resources needed to deliver this course. In addition to design and media support, the TLL provided the training and documentation to sustain future offerings of the course from both technical and pedagogical perspectives, creating guides for facilitators and developers to reference in future offerings.
Timeline Fall 2014 - Summer 2015