Evolutionary concepts are essential for a scientific understanding of most issues surrounding modern medicine, agriculture, biotechnology, and the environment. If the mantra for biology education in the 20th century was, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," the mantra for the 21st century must be, "Nothing in biology…

E-learning promises to reach a more heterogeneous student body comprised of non-traditional learners. As educational institutions reach out to new students, serious concern must be paid to cultural concerns and individual differences. Learning objects provide a framework to think about localizing educational content. The authors provide an…

The author has always loved teaching a lesson on self-portraits to her eighth-grade students. Portraits raise the bar and, when they are successful, convince the students that they really can draw. Each year they explore the basic concepts of portraiture, but use different media, sizes and styles. The author likes to interject art history and…

In this article, the author describes a lesson he created for his second-grade classes which was inspired by the children's book, "Why is Blue Dog Blue?", by George Rodrigue. In this lesson, the students make associations between places, food and events to determine the color of their dogs. (Contains 3 resources.)

Copyright in the United States can be traced back to the U.S. Constitution in 1787. To encourage authorship of creative works, Congress created a limited monopoly in Section 106 of the Copyright Act of 1790. To balance this monopoly, Congress drafted Section 107 which provides public access to creative works through fair use. Revisions were…

Understanding how experienced designers approach complex design problems provides new perspectives on how they translate instructional design (ID) models and processes into practice. In this article, the authors describe the results of a study in which 16 "seasoned" designers shared compelling stories from practice that offered insights into their…

One classical instructional effect of cognitive load theory (CLT) is the worked-example effect. Although the vast majority of studies have focused on well-structured and algorithmic sub-domains of mathematics or physics, more recent studies have also analyzed learning with examples from complex domains in which only heuristic solution strategies…

This article develops the motivating opportunities model from its previous conceptual framework to its design, development, and instructional implications. It includes building the utility of the model for implementation around the acronym SUCCESS, representing a systematic approach to analyzing and designing motivation for situational,…

We must reengineer both how we carry out educational R&D and the schools in which this work occurs if we want to achieve more productive ends. Education needs a Design, Educational Engineering, and Development infrastructure, which includes a rapid prototyping process by which researchers and practitioners co-develop innovations, try them in…

English for Specific Purposes is an obligatory subject for the first two levels at the Sudanese Universities. It is taught as a university requirement. Accordingly, the students obsess on how to pass the examination, not to achieve any development in the language field. Even the teachers concentrate on the content rather than the skills, which the…

One of the dilemmas faced by today's faculty is assuring quality in online courses. As one solution to that dilemma, Quality Matters (QM), a program of MarylandOnline, built a rubric of design standards informed by existing research literature and best practices. The rubric was implemented within a faculty-centred, peer review process in which…

Compassion is a deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another. It is a mixture of words, thoughts, and actions that allow a child to be sympathetic to the needs of others. Young children today witness many conflicting values. Values promoted in the media and popular culture often glorify disrespect and unkindness, with beauty and possessions…

The work reported here forms part of a UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded project (BL4ACE) (http://bl4ace.tvu.ac.uk/). This project built on previous work that evaluated the effectiveness of a learning design to underpin academic competence in a Business Studies degree. A significant concern of the blended learning design was to…

Inquiry does not replace information literacy; it encompasses it. It encourages librarians to consider instructional design beyond information search, retrieval, citation, and use. Inquiry-based learning invites school librarians to step into all aspects of instructional planning, from activating prior knowledge straight through to reflection.…

This paper presents a methodology for the design of intelligent learning environments. We recognise that in the educational technology field, theory development and system-design should be integrated and rely on an iterative process that addresses: (a) the difficulty to elicit precise, concise, and operationalized knowledge from "experts" and (b)…