The Ontological Choreography of Continuing Professional Development: A Mixed-Methods Study of Continuing Professional Development Leaders and Program Directors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Reports have forecast significant changes ahead for Continuing Professional Development (CPD). With new models on the horizon, CPD developers will require additional knowledge and training. Our objective was to learn how CPD leaders and developers came into their roles, if they are engaged in scholarship and the challenges and opportunities in pursuing scholarship. Methods: We conducted a mixed grounded theory study, inviting CPD leaders within our institution for interviews focused on career paths, CPD and scholarly activities, networks, and supports and challenges. We invited 405 program/conference directors from our institution to participate in a survey focused on similar themes. We used the framework of ontological choreography in our final analysis. Results: We conducted 13 interviews and had a survey response rate of 28.6% (n = 116). We identified three themes: (1) the pathway to becoming an expert in CPD planning and delivery is often unplanned, unclear, and uncredentialed; (2) CPD is undervalued as a field, with inadequate time and funding allocated; and (3) engagement with scholarship is variable while identifying resources to support scholarship is difficult. Discussion: Beyond the usual calls for CPD to be more appropriately recognized and valued, this article offers another way to explore why past visions of the future have not been fully realized; CPD means different things to different people; it is ontologically different even across a single network in a single faculty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.054 | 0.063 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".