Massachusetts' Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) undertook improvements in arts standards following the publication of the National Core Arts Standards and adopted revised standards, the Massachusetts Arts Curriculum Framework (the Framework) in 2019. In spring 2023, DESE contracted with RMC Research to conduct a third party,…

Academic preparedness is critical when it comes to student success in college, but research on factors such as academic performance indicators and behaviors has shown that many students are not prepared for college. While may studies highlight that college-bound students need help becoming academically prepared for college, fewer studies have…

Significant variations in educational outcomes across both the spatial and socioeconomic spectra in Australia have been widely debated by policymakers in recent years. This paper examines these variations and decomposes educational outcomes into 3 major input factors: availability of school resources, socioeconomic background, and a latent factor…

A comprehensive theoretical, legal and practical basis for OER has been developed over the past fifteen years, supported by the expansion of open source curation platforms and the work of advocacy groups and international bodies. OER's potential has been sufficiently documented; the question remains how best to support, integrate and normalise OER…

This note from the field reviews the sustainability of an institution-wide program for adopting and adapting open and alternative educational resources (OAER) at Kansas State University (K-State). Developed in consult of open textbook initiatives at other institutions and modified around the needs and expectations of K-State students and faculty,…

Computer systems tend to be ubiquitous as they become more integrated in our everyday activities, embedded in tables, shoes, watch and plenty of others connected things (CT). In the e-learning field, the transformations induced by the Internet of Things (IoT) allow individuals to learn whenever they want, accessing a quantity of diverse digital…

This essay is written in two sections. The first, following a short introduction, is made up of three scenarios drawn from the life and work of Martin Buber. As well as demonstrating his obvious interest in human relationships with the other-than-human, each scenario describes an encounter between either Buber himself or a stand-in character and a…

This paper discusses the potential of language centres in higher education as laboratories for innovation. Despite their hybrid character as central service providers that are also defined by their teaching, their positioning at the academic periphery, and the lack of a mandate to do academic research, language centres still have an obligation to…

In twenty-first-century classrooms, teachers are increasingly seeking resources and finding connection within the virtual space. Within a mass of online choice, this work tests theories related to the choices of individuals on social media and examines individuals' agency as they curate resources. Identifying driving forces across individuals'…

Community colleges were on the long list of beneficiaries when the federal government in March passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Given the length of the list, however, the money only stretched so far, and two-year colleges have been creative and judicious about how they spent their allocations. To begin with,…

In the following Q&A, NEBHE's [New England Board of Higher Education's] Fellow for Open Education, Lindsey Gumb, takes the pulse of Open Education in Rhode Island with two key leaders in the field: Dragan Gill, who is a Rhode Island College reference librarian and co-chair of the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative, and Daniela Fairchild,…

PhysPort (www.physport.org) has become the go-to place for physics educators to learn to apply research-­based teaching and assessment in their classrooms. Usage (defined as the total number of visits) has doubled every two years since the site was released in 2011, and 20% of all U.S. physics faculty and 7% of U.S. high school physics teachers…

For many children living in Northern and mountainous regions of the world, playing in snow is enticing and connotes childhood for many adults. Even so, researchers have paid little attention to children's play in/with snow and ice. This paper aims to contribute to the growing knowledge on children's competencies and child-nature relationships by…

Jupyter notebooks are widely used for data analysis across a large number of scientific disciplines. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, I developed a series of computational exercises using the Jupyter notebook to replace the laboratory exercises usually undertaken in my course. My students had no prior coding knowledge and therefore these…

E-learning is considered as an important component of enhancing teaching and learning processes by Higher Learning Institutions in Tanzania. In the context of teaching and learning, e-learning encompasses the use of information, computers and technology to enhance communication in distance learning. This paper discusses the applicability of…