Coach developers’ confessional tale of an online professional development course for Masters fitness coaches

ABSTRACT

Coach developers often design and deliver professional development (PD) courses for coaches that are research-based, personally tailored, and effectively taught in asynchronous online platforms. However, not all of these endeavours are successful in developing coaches. This is a confessional tale of what went wrong and why in an online PD course for adult fitness coaches, from our perspectives as the coach developers. What originally began as an action research project of a PD course on psychosocial aspects of coaching adult fitness athletes, our tale is crafted in five scenes with data from emails, reflexive diary entries, course content and analytics, and post-course interviews. We specifically examine (a) the startling consequences of content knowledge, (b) our misaligned expectations as trained and qualified CDs, (c) student-centred active learning strategies backfiring, (d) differing subjective experiences of the same online classroom, and (e) the unexplained lack of learner motivation.

KEYWORDS:

• Andragogy
• asynchronous
• reflective practice
• learning
• technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.