Fostering strong relationships that break silos between learning and work and align skill-building opportunities across secondary, postsecondary, adult and professional levels is critical to building high-quality career pathways and learner-centered career preparation ecosystems. In this work, trust, common purpose and resources for sustainability…

By the start of 2015 all University courses in Australia were required to be compliant with the new the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). Quality in higher education seeks to achieve three goals - quality of design, quality of conformance and quality of performance. This paper brings together a number of higher education principles such…

In 2011, the Association of American Universities (AAU) embarked on an ambitious effort to improve the instructional quality and effectiveness of undergraduate introductory Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. The primary focus was on sustainable implementation of evidence-based methods of instruction in courses that…

Research shows that teachers affect student learning more than any other factor. The Educator Effectiveness Research Alliance, a collaborative partnership of educators, policymakers, and researchers, seeks to improve educator quality through research and analytic technical support. Initially focused on Texas, the alliance has expanded to include…

The position of science and technology in Scottish primary schools is broadly similar to most other primary schools throughout Great Britain. There are certain schools and individuals that perform at a very high level but many schools are hampered by a lack of resources, a lack of confidence in teaching the topics and some significant gaps in the…

The Informatics program at Mercer University is offered at four regional academic centers located throughout the state of Georgia. We serve non-traditional students who have primary responsibilities such as caring for family, working, and participating in their communities. We aim to offer availability and access to all required courses, access to…

In this summary, authors and co-directors of "Public Impact," Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel, state that, in most locations, the relationship between organized teachers and reformers remains at best a tenuous truce and at worst a pitched battle. None are really getting what they want. Teachers are no closer to achieving the…

In this chapter, the authors draw on their experiences with working in building virtual communities of teachers and a pilot program to examine the prospects for increasing consistency in the effectiveness of new teacher support through online networks. Although not intended as a substitute for high-quality face-to-face mentoring experiences,…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law in December 2015, is the latest reauthorization of one of the most influential pieces of federal education legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The law had not been reauthorized since 2001 when the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed, and ESSA is the result of…

In the fall of 2008, a coalition of Minnesota foundations commissioned a local research organization to assess the state's ability to undertake a major improvement in school readiness and early learning services for disadvantaged children. The findings were discouraging. Richard Chase, working at the research arm of St. Paul's Amherst H. Wilder…

The University of the West Indies Open Campus and Athabasca University conducted a pilot workshop to see if open educational resources (OER) could be used to construct curricula. UWIOC was interested in increasing distance education offerings and Athabasca University was interested in expanding programming to offer an online graduate program in…

Student success is at the heart of both institutional effectiveness and the community college mission, yet measuring such success at community colleges is problematic. This article highlights three efforts to grapple with this problem--a multistate work group of system- and state-level policymakers to create an improved set of student success…

The public special education system of the Republic of Azerbaijan is built on the Soviet science of "defectology." In this system, most government-provided educational services segregate children with disabilities in special schools and home environments, separate from children without disabilities and from society at large. From 2005 to…

China started up pilot projects for the evaluation of teaching work at regular higher education institutions (HEIs) in 1994, and, beginning in 2003, the Ministry of Education (MOE) formally set up a system of cyclical teaching evaluation. Among the 592 undergraduate colleges and universities that were listed in the plan for the first round of…

CELE's International Pilot Project on Evaluating Quality in Educational Spaces aims to assist education authorities, schools and others to maximise the use of and investment in learning environments. This article provides an update on the pilot project, which is currently being implemented in Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal and the United…