Discusses categories of common approaches K-12 and higher education faculty members take to adapt their courses for distance delivery. Describes the "dive-in technique," the "chunking approach," and the "start-from-scratch" approach. These different approaches to the problem of distance education illustrate that there are a variety of ways to be…

Collaborative online course development brings together a group of staff with experience in course content, instructional design, multimedia, graphic arts, and HTML formatting to create a course. The process is illustrated through by a collaborative design initiative at Grant MacEwan College to convert existing print-based distance courses to a…

Provides a history of the Instructional Technology Center at Iowa State University and describes its present operations. Highlights include an organizational chart; classroom services; instructional development services, related to faculty development and courseware creation; creative services that support multimedia, graphics, and television…

Describes the design of a short course on electronic searching for high school students. Identifies seven steps for students to apply to an electronic search. Discusses planning the approach to instruction (a syllabus and workbook, goals, educational objectives, and evaluative criteria). Presents a 10-day schedule that organizes the seven steps…

Explores what a move to Web-based education means for today's educators as they reinvent their professional practice in a distance learning environment. Presents traditional views of teachers and teaching and contrasts them with new paradigms for teaching and learning. Offers critical knowledge, skills, and other supports needed to shift from…

Describes an approach to teaching politics that employs actions, scenes, agents, agency, and purpose to encourage students to experience and analyze political behavior. Argues that students participate more in class when they assume a role that is clearly "not themselves." Uses a course about the U.S. presidency as an example. (DSK)

Presents the basics of an instructional delivery model used in a course developed at Troy State University (Alabama). The program combines the best elements of traditional and distance education. The reading and writing materials, interactions, audiovisual media, and tests are discussed. (AEF)

This paper aims to provide a general overview of the cohort of teachers who undertook a major professional development program Including Studies of Asia in Curriculum in South Australia in 2000. As the program was the principal vehicle for introducing South Australian teachers to Studies of Asia, ensuring its ongoing relevance was critical. The…

The purpose of this article is to provide a rationale for collecting and using curriculum-based measurement (CB) data as well as providing specific guidelines for how to collect CBM data in reading, spelling, and math. Relying on the research conducted on CBM over the past 25 years, we define what CBM is and how it is different from…

This article features Edcouch-Elsa High School, a 1,500-student comprehensive high school in Edcouch, Texas. Edcouch-Elsa, which is located in the southern Rio Grande Valley, draws students from Edcouch, Elsa, and the surrounding agricultural communities located in the Delta Area of Hidalgo County, Texas. With about 25% of the students living with…

Biology teachers in introductory and upper level high school courses generally present principles of taxonomy as part of the curriculum. Students learn about classification systems that categorizes species into recognized taxonomic groups based on their degrees of structural divergence or derived ancestral traits. References made, hereafter, to…

One requirement often stressed by the author's Japanese business English students in sales and marketing positions is the need to talk about the product, or make presentations, in terms of its market growth and market share over time with the use of a visual representation. These requests have linguistic and conceptual elements that demand a lot…

This article describes how a small business school, as part of a strategic planning initiative to improve career services, added a self-directed career planning lab to an existing managerial communication course. The lab concept and the learning design are innovative because they met a student need without creating additional time demands on the…

We discuss the development of an instructional design model, WisCom (Wisdom Communities), based on socio-constructivist and sociocultural learning philosophies and distance education principles for the development of online wisdom communities, and the application and evaluation of the model in an online graduate course in the USA. The WisCom model…

The unprecedented growth, development and implementation of information technology (IT) driven by e-commerce and other technological advances have resulted in an increased demand of technology skilled workers (Reichgelt, Zhang, & Price, 2002; United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). In response to degree-dependent…