Online PD Can Work - If It's Built Right

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes professional learning actually stick. Not what looks good on an agenda or satisfies a box on a PD hours log. What actually changes how a teacher shows up in front of students.

A recent column in Educational Leadership by Bryan Goodwin caught my attention. Drawing on a meta-analysis of 115 peer-reviewed studies, it takes a serious look at a question the field has been circling for years: can online PD really work for teachers? The findings aren't particularly surprising if you've spent time designing or sitting through professional learning. But they're worth naming clearly, because the ed-tech industry hasn't always built online learning with these things in mind.

What the research actually says

Goodwin synthesizes four takeaways.

Online PD is a viable alternative for busy teachers. Flexibility matters. Teachers appreciated being able to learn on their own schedule — a podcast during a commute, a module after kids go to bed. This isn't a compromise. For working professionals managing 30 students a day, it's often the more realistic option.

Done well, it can be more personalized than in-person. Short, targeted sessions beat all-day in-service workshops for teachers who already know some of the content. The ability to pause, revisit, and go deeper where you need to is a feature, not a fallback.

Interaction isn't optional. Clicking through slides at the kitchen table might be convenient, but without feedback and real dialogue, participation drops and learning doesn't transfer. Online courses without some form of guided interaction have low uptake. This one matters most.

Structure and flexibility need to coexist. Teachers want choice and self-direction, but not chaos. Too much open-endedness becomes overwhelming. Clear objectives and a coherent arc matter even in a self-paced environment.

Goodwin's bottom line: what matters most, whether online, in-person, or hybrid, is that teachers find the content applicable to their daily practice, can ask for and receive feedback, and have opportunities to apply what they learn. That's been the finding for decades. Joyce and Showers showed it in their foundational coaching research. Darling-Hammond and colleagues reinforced it in their 2017 review of effective professional learning. Online formats are no exception.

The reality on the ground

The reason online learning has a bad reputation in educator circles isn't really about the internet. It's about what most of it has been: slide decks converted to click-through modules, video recordings of lectures nobody asked to watch, reflection prompts with no one listening on the other end.

The research is clear that feedback and guided interaction are what make learning transfer to practice. But feedback at scale is hard. A live instructor can adjust, respond, push back. A self-paced module can't, unless you build something into it that can.

Districts are navigating a related set of challenges that don't get named as often as they should. Scaling professional learning across a building or a district is harder than it sounds. Getting everyone through the same experience at the same time is a scheduling problem. Relying on multiple trainers introduces variation in message, quality, and emphasis that quietly undermines coherence. And then there's the evergreen problem: what happens to teachers who join after the launch year? Most professional learning designs don't have a good answer to that. New teachers get a compressed version, or nothing, and the shared foundation erodes.

What we're building toward

At MPM Essentials, that's the design problem we've been working on, specifically for teachers of multilingual learners. Online PD isn't inherently inferior. The feedback loop has just been missing. We're not reinventing the wheel here. We're trying to upgrade the tires.

MPM Essentials is built around the Responsive Instruction Framework, a three-phase approach designed to help teachers work smarter with multilingual learners without watering down content or lowering expectations. The philosophy is amplify, not simplify.

The program is designed with all four of Goodwin's findings in mind: flexible and self-paced, with clear structure, content grounded in actual classroom practice, and a feedback loop that doesn't require a live instructor to be present at every moment.

That last piece is where we've invested the most. Each lesson includes a structured coaching interaction, a set of questions designed to surface a teacher's own thinking about their practice. What's working with your multilingual learners right now? Where do you feel uncertain? What would you try differently? Teachers respond, and an AI coaching companion responds back. Not with a grade or a checklist, but with the kind of follow-up a good instructional coach would offer. Teachers leave each lesson with a record of their thinking, grounded in their own classroom, that builds across the course.

That's the feedback loop. It's not perfect, and it's not a replacement for human coaching. But it's something, at a scale and cost that in-person coaching alone can't reach.

The format question

To be clear: we're not making the case that online replaces in-person. For this kind of work, the most powerful model is blended, and we mean that in a specific way. Different formats serve different learning purposes. The design question isn't which one to choose — it's which one to use when, and for what.

Most educators are familiar with the flipped classroom model: new content gets introduced before class, so that the time together isn't spent on transmission. It's spent on the harder, more valuable work — application, discussion, problem-solving. The same logic applies to teacher learning. Asynchronous learning handles the exploration of new ideas, at each teacher's own pace, on their own schedule. In-person handles what asynchronous can't: the conversation, the collaborative practice, the collective sense-making that only happens when people are working through something together in real time.

Each format does what it does best. Neither is asked to do what it can't.

This also addresses the scale and evergreen problems in a way that in-person alone never will. The asynch component delivers a consistent experience to every teacher, whether they're in the first cohort or joining three years later. The in-person component builds on that foundation rather than rebuilding it from scratch every time.

The honest answer

Can online learning work for teacher professional learning? Yes, when it's built with the research in mind rather than built around convenience. When the flexibility is real but the structure is too. When there's a feedback loop that actually closes.

At MPM Essentials, those aren't afterthoughts. They're the problems the design is trying to solve.

Districts are now asking, as budgets tighten and pandemic-era recovery funds dry up, whether they can afford quality professional learning. We'd reframe it slightly. The question is whether they can afford professional learning that doesn't transfer to practice. That's the more expensive problem.

If you're thinking through what effective, scalable professional learning for teachers of multilingual learners could look like in your district, we'd genuinely like to talk.

References

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Learning Policy Institute.

Goodwin, B. (2026, May). Can online PD work? Educational Leadership, 83(8). ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/can-online-pd-work

Joyce, B., & Showers, B. (2002). Student achievement through staff development (3rd ed.). ASCD.

Stavermann, K. (2025). Online teacher professional development: A research synthesis on effectiveness and evaluation. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 30(1), 203–240.