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"Essential Elements in Designing Online Discussions to Promote Cognitive Presence - A Practical Experience"

"oday's education system includes ingrained practices, including policy and decades-old methods, that prevent schools from moving to competency-based models. Solutions to this problem include: Creating and making available educational resources on competency-based learning. These resources might be best practices, rubrics or tools, or research. Convening a coalition of League of Innovative Schools districts that are working to build successful competency-based models. Creating a technical solution for flexible tracking of competencies and credits. Problem No. 2: Leadership doesn't always support second-order change, and those in potential leadership roles, such as teachers and librarians, aren't always empowered to help effect change. Solutions to this problem include: Promoting League of Innovative Schools efforts to enable second-order change leadership Creating a framework, to be used in professional development, that would target and explain second-order change leadership discussions Schedule panel discussions about second-order change leadership Problem No. 3: Communities and cultures are resistant to change, including technology-based change Solutions to this problem include: Identifying new and engaging ways to share cutting-edge and tech-savvy best practices with school and district stakeholders and community members Involve business leaders in technology-rich schools and create school-business partnerships Look to influential organizations to spearhead national ed-tech awareness campaigns Problem No. 4: Education budgets aren't always flexible enough to support the cost, sustainability, or scalability of innovations Solutions to this problem include: Build relationships with local businesses and career academies, and create incentives for companies to hire students, in order to create a revenue stream for schools Look to competitive pricing and creative solutions Leaders must not be afraid t

"Clarifying Ownership of Teacher-Created Digital Content Empowers Educators to Personalize Education, Address Individual Student Needs The webinar explored how states and districts can empower and encourage educators to create and share high-quality digital instructional materials to improve students' learning experiences. Presenters discussed the central legal issue of ownership of instructional materials and offered recommendations for effectively managing the increased use of digital content, including with respect to the advantages provided by open educational resources (OER). "

"This guide is organized in two main sections. Section I provides our working definition of distance education and anatomizes its many modes and models, dissecting their strengths and weaknesses in terms of instructional quality and effectiveness. Section II focuses on methods, collating best practices and lessons learned about teaching and learning from successful global distance education models. The guide also contains a glossary of terms, a reference section for further Web-based information on distance learning programs and approaches, and an extensive bibliography of the sources cited within the guide. Where available, we provide website addresses for every program discussed here. We also provide the URLs of websites that offer free content, but not those of commercial websites, which can typically be accessed online by searching for them by name."

"Therefore, state and district policymakers should establish clear policies. Policymakers have options when creating copyright rules, including: If the policy is designed to have the teacher be the author of the educational resources she creates, take the position that the teacher is the author under the teacher exception and enter into a written agreement with the teacher If a state or district takes this approach, the state or district could also require that the teacher grant it a license to use, and to authorize others to use, the materials. Alternatively, if a state or district takes the position that educator-created materials are works made for hire, it can grant licenses to educators in their own works so that they can use, share, redistribute, and refine educator-created materials. In other words, the employer retains the copyright but provides the creator of the content and others with a license so that reuse, revision, and redistribution rights are defined upfront. States and districts can choose to license other state- and district-owned content, where the state or district owns the copyright in that work (such as teacher training materials), as open educational resources (OERs). For more on the discussion on who owns teacher-created digital content, including licensing options under Creative Commons and 7 recommendations from SETDA on how states can introduce policies on copyright, read the full brief."

"Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review" Javiera Atenasa,b* and Leo Havemannc Abstract Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are freely available and openly licensed. Repositories of OER (ROER) are platforms that host and facilitate access to these resources. ROER should not just be designed to store this content - in keeping with the aims of the OER movement, they should support educators in embracing open educational practices (OEP) such as searching for and retrieving content that they will reuse, adapt or modify as needed, without economic barriers or copyright restrictions. This paper reviews key literature on OER and ROER, in order to understand the roles ROER are said or supposed to fulfil in relation to furthering the aims of the OER movement. Four themes which should shape repository design are identified, and the following 10 quality indicators (QI) for ROER effectiveness are discussed: featured resources; user evaluation tools; peer review; authorship of the resources; keywords of the resources; use of standardised metadata; multilingualism of the repositories; inclusion of social media tools; specification of the creative commons license; availability of the source code or original files. These QI form the basis of a method for the evaluation of ROER initiatives which, in concert with considerations of achievability and long-term sustainability, should assist in enhancement and development. Keywords: open educational resources; open access; open educational practice; repositories; quality assurance "

This article discusses the basics of selecting multimedia that will draw in the learners and will provide them with the best possible eLearning experience, without taking away any from the value of the core content itself.