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Teachers’ professional learning often includes online components. This study examined how a case of 37 teachers utilized a specific online asynchronous professional learning platform designed to support teachers’ growth in learning to teach statistics and data science in secondary schools in the United States. The platform’s features and learning materials were designed based on effective online learning designs, supports for self-guided learning, and research on the teaching and learning of statistics and data science. We paid particular attention to the features we designed into the platform to support self-regulation and personalizing the experiences to meet their preferred learning goals such as allowing for free choice of learning materials, flexibility of when and how long to engage, providing personal recommendations based on user input, internal systems to track progress, and generating certificates of completion. In this study, we used a case study with both quantitative and qualitative data to examine whether teachers had gains in meeting learning goals related to their development in teaching statistics and data science, had sustained engagement, and found the features for personalization supportive for their learning. Results showed, overall, positive growth towards meeting learning goals and making small changes towards improved classroom practice. Most teachers were generally engaged in sustained ways across the study period, though we found six different patterns of completion that highlight ways in which teachers’ goal-directed and self-regulated learning occurred within the busy schedules of educators. Several personalized features, especially the recommendations and tracking system, were highly utilized and perceived as supportive of teachers’ learning.

With online learning becoming a more viable option for teachers to develop their expertise, our report shares one such effort focused on improving the teaching of statistics. We share design principles and learning opportunities in an online course developed specifically to serve as a wide-scale online professional development opportunity for educators, thus deemed as a massive open online course for educators (MOOC-Ed). In this report we focus on a subset of 412 participants who identified themselves as classroom teachers. We use multiple data sources, quantitative and qualitative, to characterize changes in teachers’ beliefs and perspectives about statistics and identify triggers in the course that appear to influence teachers’ sense making about issues related to teaching statistics. Implications about specific course experiences that served as triggers for critical reflection and change are discussed.