What is OPL? 

The Online Professional Learning System (OPL) is the Department of Education’s platform for delivering and managing online professional learning opportunities for staff. OPL is available to all Department of Education staff through the portal.
Anyone wishing to provide Department of Education-sanctioned, online professional learning for staff can use the system to notify users, to provide access to the learning materials, to track user’s progress and to monitor completion of courses.

As an alternative method of delivering professional learning, OPL provides significant benefits to the organisation including:

• highly flexible universal access to learning opportunities
• time and cost-effective course provision
• ease of update of course materials
• significantly reduced time away from the classroom for teachers, in line with the Classroom First strategy and
• opportunities for building active online communities of practice around particular topics of interest or for specialist staff groups.

The system has the capacity to remove one of the Department’s most significant barriers to providing system-wide professional learning, namely the logistical difficulties and prohibitive costs involved in delivering courses, particularly to school-based staff in remote areas.