A connective massive open online course for K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics teachers in New Mexico Pueblo schools

This note describes preliminary work directed toward developing a teacher-training project that is intended to increase Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) proficiency among elementary and high school teachers in Northern New Mexico Pueblo schools. This project builds upon prior work that trained K-8 teachers to use investigative teaching, which in turn had a significant positive impact on the math and science proficiency of Native-American and Hispanic students. The current project seeks to use Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) technology to capture and scale this professional development through the use of video, imagery, and community building in order to integrate Native-American learning processes. The overall objective is to enable Pueblo teachers to more effectively teach STEM subject matter, as measured by an increase in both teacher and student content knowledge scores. If successful, the use of MOOC technology should facilitate rapid expansion of the program across New Mexico and elsewhere.