Webbing the Wonders of Webinars: An Autoethnographic Inquiry on Online Professional Learning

Abstract

As the educational front liners, teachers’ access to quality and sustainable professional development (PD) is imperative, as it is vital in delivering quality education and improving student learning outcomes. However, this may not always be a reality particularly in low-resource settings, where teachers’ PD may not be a priority or is just too costly to be implemented in a wide scale. Using analytic autoethnography, this study examined aspects of my experience, perspective, and memory in successfully completing 66 webinar sessions of the American English (AE) Live: Teacher Development Series, a PD program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State through the Online Professional English Network (OPEN). Acting as a reflective practitioner and teacher-as-researcher, I unraveled how I traversed the World Wide Web in search for free and quality PD, how I completed 11 sets of live webinar sessions from January 2018 to July 2021, how I became an agent for my own professional learning, why I believe about webinars’ potential for teachers’ PD, and what it could do to inform my pedagogical decisions. Data from my learning journal, webinar discussion posts, and interaction with my fellow participants revealed that the AE Live Webinar Series is an effective PD for teachers based on its content, active learning engagement, collaboration, models of effective practice, coaching and expert support, opportunities for feedback and reflection, and sustainability, making it a practical teachers’ PD platform particularly in low-budget countries such as the Philippines. Andragogical and heutagogical implications are provided in the light of these findings.