The online module Educational Technology and Action Learning in the Classroom was developed as part of a Masters course for Middle School Teachers in China.

In China, professional development of in-service teachers in the use of Educational Technology in the Classroom is one of the Chinese government’s educational reform measures.

However, the lack of professional development trainers in the university system has held back the achievement of this. We believed that as well as developing the online course for in-service teachers, we were also helping Beijing Normal University staff to develop their knowledge of e-learning.

By engaging with this, we ourselves at Sheffield were also developing new knowledge of inter-cultural professional development

We therefore saw there being three groups of beneficiaries of the project:

• Staff at Beijing Normal University who were able to develop new expertise in professional development of in-service teachers as a result of participating in this Project.

• The Middle School teachers studying the module.

• The e-learning team at the University of Sheffield who were able to begin to understand similarities and differences in e-learning between the UK and China.