The growth of virtual online programs at the K-12 level is unparalleled in the history of education. This book discusses what constitutes a viable online program and how programs maintain rigorous courses, creditability, and high academic standards. Barnard and Echols provide practical information about the vision, curriculum, course designs, and the impact of "for profit" online schools. This book offers practical advice and guidance to those concerned with developing and improving current programs.

What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can't afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives? Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised 'pirate' libraries and 'free universities' associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century.

Girls are beautifully and wonderfully made in God's image. This comprehensive collection of stories focused on 50 women of the Bible shows how God worked in their lives and continues to have a plan and a purpose for his beloved daughters today. In a world that too often tells girls that they are not enough, Her Story, Her Strength uses biblical retellings and reflections that include the historical context behind each story?to remind young women that they have a God who loves them deeply and empowers them to live and love like he does. For any girl ages 8 and up who is asking questions about her worth, identity, and place in the world and church, this colorful and engaging book provides a positive, loving, and scriptural lens that helps them interpret the messages they receive from their peers, media, and society. Girls who read Her Story, Her Strength will: come to a profound, unshakable understanding of God's love for them and their value in his eyes. see how they reflect God's image both innately and through the actions, words, and attitudes they choose each day. learn about biblical characters and events in a way designed specifically for them. In addition, Her Story, Her Strength: features readers' favorite women of the Bible as well as many less-well-known characters, showing God's consistent presence in the lives of women throughout Scripture. is divided into short sections that are both comprehensive and accessible, making it a wonderful tool for school or church lessons as well as family devotions or personal reflection. emphasizes how each woman reflects the image of her Creator, demonstrating the immense value God places on women and girls and pointing them back to him-all from a position rooted in biblical values. includes beautiful, full-color illustrations that help bring each woman to life.

This reissue, first published in 1980, is based on the experiences of the International Extension College in developing distance teaching. The volume begins by reviewing the world problems of educational quality and quantity, and then examines the ways in which print, broadcasts and group study have been used to train teachers, to improve classroom education, to teach by correspondence out of school, and to support rural development. It then considers how that experience can be used, perhaps by creating a network of radio colleges, to supplement and extend existing schools and colleges. Finally, the book includes a descriptive and annotated bibliography of over 100 distance teaching projects in 65 third world countries.

Artificial Intelligence and Learning Futures: Critical Narratives of Technology and Imagination in Higher Education explores the implications of artificial intelligence's adoption in higher education and the challenges to building sustainable instead of dystopic schooling. As AI becomes integral to both pedagogy and profitability in today's colleges and universities, a critical discourse on these systems and algorithms is urgently needed to push back against their potential to enable surveillance, control, and oppression. This book examines the development, risks, and opportunities inherent to AI in education and curriculum design, the problematic ideological assumptions of intelligence and technology, and the evidence base and ethical imagination required to responsibly implement these learning technologies in a way that ensures quality and sustainability. Leaders, administrators, and faculty as well as technologists and designers will find these provocative and accessible ideas profoundly applicable to their research, decision-making, and concerns.

Every day, learners use and reuse open, digital resources for learning. Reusing Open Resources offers a vision of the potential of these open, online resources to support learning. The book follows on from Reusing Online Resources: A Sustainable Approach to E-learning. At that time focus was on the creation, release and reuse of digital learning resources modeled on educational materials. Since then the open release of resources and data has become mainstream, rather than specialist, changing societal expectations around resource reuse. Social and professional learning networks are now routine places for the exchange of online knowledge resources that are shared, manipulated and reused in new ways, opening opportunities for new models of business, research and learning. The goal of this book is to extend the debate of how open, online resources might support learning across diverse contexts. Twenty-four distinguished experts from nine countries distributed across Europe and North America contribute empirical evidence and ideas. Collectively they provide a vision of the potential of open, online resources to support learning across everyday contexts of education, work and life.

Tools for Teaching in an Educationally Mobile World examines the challenges that undergraduate and postgraduate teachers often encounter when working with students from different national and cultural backgrounds. It focuses on the consequences for interactive teaching and for course design in a world where students, ideas and courses are mobile, using examples and experiences from a wide range of disciplines and national contexts. It not only considers Anglophone countries, including the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, but also the use of English as a language of instruction in countries where neither teachers nor students are native English speakers. This book offers ideas for adjusting and adapting teaching approaches for culturally and linguistically diverse student groups. Students may cross national boundaries to seek accreditation, or the courses may be 'transnational', being designed in one country and delivered in another using local as well as 'fly-in' faculty. It draws upon growing good practice recommendations using tried and tested methods alongside the extensive and varied experience of the author. The book is structured around a selection of the most common issues and statements of belief held by educators, with key topics including: the impact of educational mobility on teaching and learning; teachers as mediators between academic cultural differences; learning and teaching in English; inclusive teaching and learning; encouraging student participation; assessing diverse students. With a wealth of practical tips and tools that help deal with these issues, this book will be of value to any educator working with students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. It will also interest those involved in the design of curriculum and pedagogy.

Culture plays an overarching role that impacts investment, planning, design, development, delivery, and the learning outcomes of online education. This groundbreaking book remedies a dearth of empirical research on how digital cultures and teaching and learning cultures intersect, and offers grounded theory and practical guidance on how to integrate cultural needs and sensibilities with the innovative opportunities offered by online learning. This book provides a unique analysis of culture in online education from a global perspective, and offers: * An overview of the influences that culture has on teaching, online learning, and technology* Culture-sensitive instructional design strategies and teaching guidelines for online instructors and trainers * Facilitation and support strategies for online learners from different cultures * An overview on issues of design, development, communication, and support from a cross-cultural perspective* An overview of how online education is perceived, planned, implemented, and evaluated differently in various cultural contextsWritten by international experts in the field of online learning, this text constitutes with a comprehensive comparative introduction to the role of culture in online education. It offers essential guidance for practitioners, researchers, instructors, and anyone working with online students from around the world. This text is also appropriate for graduate-level Educational Technology and Comparative and International Learning programs.

Designing Distributed Learning Environments with Intelligent Software Agents reports on the most recent, important advances in agent technologies for distributed learning. Several chapters will be devoted to various aspects of intelligent software agents in distributed learning, including the methodological and technical issues on where and how intelligent agents can contribute to meeting distributed learning needs today and tomorrow. It will benefit the Al (artificial intelligence) community and educational community in their research and development. It will propose some new and interesting research issues about developing distributed learning environments in the semantic Web age. In addition, the ideas presented in the book may also be applicable to other domains such as agent-supported Web services, distributed business process and resource integration, computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and e-commerce.

An Education in Facebook? examines and critiques the role of Facebook in the evolving landscape of higher education. At times a mandated part of classroom use, at others an informal network for students, Facebook has become an inevitable component of college life, acting alternately as an advertising, recruitment and learning tool. But what happens when educators use a corporate product, which exists outside of the control of universities, to educate students? An Education in Facebook? provides a broad discussion of the issues educators are already facing on college campuses worldwide, particularly in areas such as privacy, copyright and social media etiquette. By examining current uses of Facebook in university settings, this book offers both a thorough analytical critique as well as practical advice for educators and administrators looking to find ways to thoughtfully integrate Facebook and other digital communication tools into their classrooms and campuses.

This book consists of a selection of papers that discuss the challenges in the increasingly complex world of education and various educational problems such as moral degradation, lack of literacy, pedagogical curriculum and innovation, educational technology. Moreover, the book provides papers that deal with educational innovation in the era of Society 5.0, with a view to discuss and resolve various social challenges, issues, and problems relating to educators, students, the dynamics of the education system, and social dynamics. The subject areas treated in this book are: Character Education in Society 5.0 Era, Multiliteracy Education in Society 5.0 Era, Early Childhood Education in Society 5.0 Era, Inclusive Education in Society 5.0 Era, Curriculum, Media and Educational Technology for Primary Education in Society 5.0 Era, Joyful and Meaningful Learning in Society 5.0 Era, and HOTS in Society 5.0 Era. This book will help educators, stakeholders, and also parents to cope with the challenges in education.

The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks explores the characteristics of productive networked learning situations and, through a series of case studies, identifies some of the key qualities of successful designs. The case studies include networks from a variety of disciplinary and professional fields, including graphic design, chemistry, health care, library science, and teacher education. These learning networks have been implemented in a variety of settings: undergraduate courses in higher education, continuing professional development, and informal networks for creating and sharing knowledge on a particular topic. They are rich in reusable design ideas. The book introduces a framework for analyzing learning networks to show how knowledge, human interaction and physical and digital resources combine in the operation of productive learning networks. The book also argues that learning through interaction in networks has a long history. It combines ideas from architecture, anthropology, archaeology, education, sociology and organizational theory to illustrate and understand networked forms of learning.

The New Landscape of Mobile Learning is the first book to provide a research based overview of the largely untapped array of potential tools that m-Learning offers educators and students in face-to-face, hybrid, and distance education. This cutting edge guide provides: * An essential explanation of the emergence and role of Apps in education * Design guidelines for educational Apps * Case studies and student narratives from across the US describing successful App integration into both K-12 and Higher Education * Robust, research-based evaluation criteria for educational Apps Although many believe that Apps have the potential to create opportunities for transformative mobile education, a disparity currently exists between the individuals responsible for creating Apps (i.e. developers who often have little to no instructional experience) and the ultimate consumers in the classroom (i.e. K-20 educators and students). The New Landscape of Mobile Learning bridges this gap by illuminating critical design, integration, and evaluation narratives from leaders in the instructional design, distance education, and mobile learning fields.

More Urban Myths About Learning and Education: Challenging Eduquacks, Extraordinary Claims, and Alternative Facts examines common beliefs about education and learning that are not supported by scientific evidence before using research to reveal the truth about each topic. The book comprises sections on educational approaches, curriculum, educational psychology, and educational policy, concluding with a critical look at evidence-based education itself. Does playing chess improve intelligence? Should tablets and keyboards replace handwriting? Is there any truth to the 10,000-hour rule for expertise? In an engaging, conversational style, authors Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, and Casper Hulshof tackle a set of pervasive myths, effectively separating fact from fiction in learning and education.

Technology-Enhanced Professional Learning addresses the need for continuous workplace learning that derives from the emergence of new, specialized, and constantly changing work practices. While continuous learning is fundamental to enabling individuals to function in and productively shape contemporary workplaces, digital technology is increasingly central to productive workplace practice. By examining the intersection of human learning processes, emergent work practices, and patterns of use of digital technology to support learning and work, this edited collection brings the disparate fields of professional learning and technology-enhanced learning together to advance theory and practice in both realms.

Blended learning, which combines the strength of face-to-face and technology-enhanced learning, is increasingly being seen as one of the most important vehicles for education reform today. Blended learning allows both teacher and learner access to radically increased possibilities for understanding how we transmit and receive information, how we interact with others in educational settings, how we build knowledge, and how we assess what we have taught or learned. Blended Learning: Research Perspectives, Volume 2 provides readers with the most current, in-depth collection of research perspectives on this vital subject, addressing institutional issues, design and adoption issues, and learning issues, as well as an informed meditation on future trends and research in the field. As governments, foundations, schools, and colleges move forward with plans and investments for vast increases in blended learning environments, a new examination of the existing research on the topic is essential reading for all those involved in this educational transformation.

Socializing the Classroom: Social Networks and Online Learning, by Susan B. Barnes, examines how social media can be used in education through two research grants and real-world applications. Barnes analyzes social media including Facebook, Courseware, and Second Life, while providing a theoretical foundation for examining social software. A new generation of students is surrounded by digital technologies, leading scholars and teachers to consider virtual worlds to engage students. By bringing together human-computer-interaction theories with social theory, Socializing the Classroom creates a theoretical foundation for future research in the area of social media, online learning technologies, and the development of social networks. Readers will gain a better understanding of how students use online learning environments to communicate task-oriented messages and maintain social interactions. This is an essential text for scholars, students, and those interested in social networks and the implementation of technology in education.

Winner of the 2014 AECT Design & Development Outstanding Book Award An Architectural Approach to Instructional Design is organized around a groundbreaking new way of conceptualizing instructional design practice. Both practical and theoretically sound, this approach is drawn from current international trends in architectural, digital, and industrial design, and focuses on the structural and functional properties of the artifact being designed rather than the processes used to design it. Harmonious with existing systematic design models, the architectural approach expands the scope of design discourse by introducing new depth into the conversation and merging current knowledge with proven systematic techniques. An architectural approach is the natural result of increasing technological complexity and escalating user expectations. As the complexity of design problems increases, specialties evolve their own design languages, theories, processes, tools, literature, organizations, and standards. An Architectural Approach to Instructional Design describes the implications for theory and practice, providing a powerful and commercially relevant introduction for all students of instructional design.

Digital Solidarity in Education is a book for educators, scholars, and students interested in better understanding both the role technology can play in schools and its potential for strengthening communities, optimizing the effects of globalization, and increasing educational access. The digital solidarity movement prioritizes the engagement and mobilization of students from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, and economic backgrounds, and with giftedness and/or disabilities, to utilize and apply technologies. This powerful book introduces innovative technological programs including virtual schools, e-tutoring, and interactive online communities for K-12 students that can: * increase students' knowledge and understanding of advanced concepts while reinforcing their basic skills; * reinforce students' communication in their first language while introducing second and third language possibilities; * nurture students' capabilities to think analytically, while using creative and innovative ideas to think simultaneously "outside of the box." The experienced author team shows how collaborative partners from the private sector can assist public school systems and educators in creating access for all students to technological innovations, with a goal of increasing individual opportunities for future college and career success. Combining theoretical scholarship and research with the personal perspectives of practitioners in the field, this volume shares with readers both the nuts and bolts of using technology in education, and the importance of doing so.

Winner of the 2014 AECT Design & Development Outstanding Book Award An Architectural Approach to Instructional Design is organized around a groundbreaking new way of conceptualizing instructional design practice. Both practical and theoretically sound, this approach is drawn from current international trends in architectural, digital, and industrial design, and focuses on the structural and functional properties of the artifact being designed rather than the processes used to design it. Harmonious with existing systematic design models, the architectural approach expands the scope of design discourse by introducing new depth into the conversation and merging current knowledge with proven systematic techniques. An architectural approach is the natural result of increasing technological complexity and escalating user expectations. As the complexity of design problems increases, specialties evolve their own design languages, theories, processes, tools, literature, organizations, and standards. An Architectural Approach to Instructional Design describes the implications for theory and practice, providing a powerful and commercially relevant introduction for all students of instructional design.

Inclusive Technology Enhanced Learning draws together a remarkable breadth of research findings from across the field, providing useful data on the power of technology to solve cognitive, physical, emotional or geographic challenges in education. A far-ranging assessment, this book combines research, policy, and practical evidence to show what digital technologies work best for which learners and why. Inclusive Technology Enhanced Learning takes a number of unique perspectives, looking at uses of digital technologies through a detailed learning framework; considering different groups of users and how they can be individually supported through digital technologies; and exploring how those who support different categories of learners can apply technologies to their specific support needs. This powerful meta-analysis of research on technology enhanced learning will be invaluable reading for anyone concerned with the impacts of digital technologies on learning across subject areas, age ranges, and levels of ability.

As online learning continues to become more prominent in K-12 education, it will be important that teachers are knowledgeable about both the potential of online learning and the challenges associated with moving curricula online. This book, written by a former secondary online teacher who now teaches online instructional methods to practicing K-12 teachers, addresses those challenges and offers practical, research-based approaches to creating successful online learning experiences. Both novice and experienced K-12 teachers will benefit from the author s strategies for creating engaging, learner-centered instruction in an online format. This book is unique from other practitioner-oriented books on online learning in that it focuses exclusively on adolescents experiences with online instruction.

As online learning continues to become more prominent in K-12 education, it will be important that teachers are knowledgeable about both the potential of online learning and the challenges associated with moving curricula online. This book, written by a former secondary online teacher who now teaches online instructional methods to practicing K-12 teachers, addresses those challenges and offers practical, research-based approaches to creating successful online learning experiences. Both novice and experienced K-12 teachers will benefit from the author's strategies for creating engaging, learner-centered instruction in an online format. This book is unique from other practitioner-oriented books on online learning in that it focuses exclusively on adolescents' experiences with online instruction.

This book is a response to the loss of learning experienced by children and young people during the Covid-19 crisis. It examines the measures which were taken to fix the disruption of education and their limitations particularly in reaching marginalised groups. Drawing on data and experiences from around the world, the book examines education systems as ecosystems with interdependencies between many different components which need to be considered when change is contemplated. Chapters explore the challenges involved ensuring continuity of education for all learners in times of crisis and disruption and set out practical solutions that are relevant when preparing for natural disasters and disasters caused by humans as well as for climate change challenges and future pandemics. The focus throughout is on building the sustainability of learners' education into education systems to ensure educational continuity for all learners in times of disruption and crisis. Including tools for planning, prompts for reflection, and future possibilities to consider, Education for All in Times of Crisis will be valuable reading for school leaders, educators and policy makers.

Inclusive Technology Enhanced Learning draws together a remarkable breadth of research findings from across the field, providing useful data on the power of technology to solve cognitive, physical, emotional or geographic challenges in education. A far-ranging assessment, this book combines research, policy, and practical evidence to show what digital technologies work best for which learners and why. Inclusive Technology Enhanced Learning takes a number of unique perspectives, looking at uses of digital technologies through a detailed learning framework; considering different groups of users and how they can be individually supported through digital technologies; and exploring how those who support different categories of learners can apply technologies to their specific support needs. This powerful meta-analysis of research on technology enhanced learning will be invaluable reading for anyone concerned with the impacts of digital technologies on learning across subject areas, age ranges, and levels of ability.