Students learn best when teachers get out of the way. Unfortunately, university classrooms continue to be intensely teacher-centric, are driven by the teacher's agenda and calendar, and embrace simple models rather than complex alternatives. These simple types of learning environments frustrate students' development of the risk-­taking and choice…

Self-directed, inquiry-based learning opportunities focused on transdisciplinary real-world problem solving have been shown to foster creativity in learners. What tools might we provide classroom teachers to scaffold them and their students through this creative process? This study examines an online informal learning environment and the role the…

Purpose: One bad hiring decision can lead to low student achievement. Research supports that teachers are the most influential factor in student success. As a result, principals' current practice of hiring teachers based on intuition and likeability must change. Given the current high stakes era, principals need reassurance that the teachers they…

This article is the second installment in a four-part "Educational Technology" series exploring a contemporary perspective on the process of instructional design. In this article, the authors reintroduce the framework of Role-Based Design (RBD) and describe practical strategies for its integration into design workflow. Next, they examine their…

Formal design studies are increasing our insight into design processes, including those of instructional design. Lessons are being learned from other design fields, and new techniques and concepts can be imported as they are demonstrated effective. The purpose of this article is to introduce a design concept--the "operational principle"--for…

This is the first in a series of four articles presenting a new outlook on the process of instructional design. Along with offering an improvement to current practice, the goal is to stimulate discussion about the role of designers, and more importantly, about the nature of the process of instructional design. The authors present in this article a…

Continuous professional development is essential for upgrading and updating teachers because the rate of social and educational change makes pre-service training an inadequate basis for long term professional competence. The design of these continuous professional development programmes must be informed by an effective needs analysis that…

Today's schools and teachers are challenged with meeting the demands of specific content standards, high stakes assessment, and developing students from diverse backgrounds to be capable of competing in a global market. These twenty-first century students must not only possess critical thinking skills and the ability to process information, but…

MacArthur launched the digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to explore how digital media are changing the way young people learn, socialize, communicate, and play. Since 2006, the Foundation has awarded grants totaling more than $100 million for research, development of innovative new technologies, new learning environments for youth,…

The author's experiences and those of the students he encounters at elite campuses no longer resemble the common experience of many college students today. What people used to call "nontraditional" students--older, working, married, and maybe still living at home--now constitute a large and growing percentage of those attending college in the…

"King Corn" is in so many ways the story of how government food policy has entirely remade the food landscape in the United States over the last 40 years. From the massive expansion of the number of acres of corn grown across the country, to the ever-increasing ways that corn is incorporated into the food production process, to the…

The 2008 commercial video game "Spore" allowed more than a million players to design their own life forms. Starting from single-celled organisms players played through a caricature of natural history. Press coverage of the game's release offer two frames for thinking about the implications of the game. Some scientists and educators saw the game as…

This article describes an instructional lesson the author developed to help students use parody to read and write original poetry. The author begins this article with an introduction to parody and a rationale for using it as an instructional strategy. Then, he describes materials and procedures he used and he shares samples of student writing. He…

Blended learning has become a prominent method of course content delivery in higher education. Researchers have found that motivation, communication, and course design are three factors that contribute to the overall success of blended learning courses and students' satisfaction with blended learning courses. This qualitative study also found that…

If our chosen aim in science education is to be inclusive and to improve students' learning achievements, then we must identify teaching methodologies that are appropriate for teaching and learning specific knowledge. Karagiorgi and Symeo (2005) remind us that instructional designers are thus challenged to translate the philosophy of…