Responds to Teachers Professional Development Needs in the Online Teaching Era

An online training platform called eTEACHERS.online developed by the Department of English Language Education (ELE) has offered English teachers support in adapting to the “new normal” of online teaching during the pandemic. The training and experience-sharing platform offers a modular online training course for English teachers to develop their knowledge and skills of teaching apps that have a proven record of effectiveness in the local context. Teachers choose the course topics that best fit their immediate training needs, taking between 5 – 12 hours of online training. In this way, teachers can ramp up their practical skills for online teaching as soon as possible. In addition, the eTEACHERS.online platform hosts exemplar video and resources of practicing “eTeachers” who have developed creative approaches to blended learning, often using technology integration to take lessons beyond the possibilities of the traditional classroom. In June 2020, the eTEACHERS.online platform served as the host of ELE’s third roundtable sharing event on e-Learning in the English language classroom “Navigating the New Normal”. Many local teachers and e-learning experts shared their experience via the webinar hosted on the platform, and recordings of their sessions remain online for local teachers’ continued reference benefit. In September 2020, a sharing session was held about the eTEACHERS.online platform and the organic development of a technology-enhanced language learning and teaching community. The department plans to continue offering timely and relevant resources for local English teachers, including a second generation of the Entry-level e-resources training course, as well as a new Intermediate-level course scheduled to be launched in 2021. The department will also host the fourth e-Learning roundtable sharing event on eTEACHERS.online in June 2021.