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"The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled "Training Our Future Teachers." The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much. The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received "the connected and concentrated focus they deserve." What's more, "instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced." Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, "don't see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.""

"I cannot train them for something that doesn't exist, but I can help them build a set of skills and experiences that will make them flexible and self-regulating."

"Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA, is a little-discussed strategy to facilitate time-to-degree, particularly for non-traditional students. The concept is to set up the structure and processes to evaluate corporate training from employment, military training, civic responsibilities, travel, and independent study and award academic credit from these out-of-the-classroom learning situations. As the higher education population diversifies with much higher percentages of working adults, PLA can be an important factor in reducing total cost and time-to-degree."

"Of all the challenges facing online learning, I believe the need to train faculty properly to be the most difficult. Without adequate training in teaching methods, I don't see how learning technologies can be used effectively. We cannot afford to go on creating a whole parallel industry of instructional designers to hold the hands of faculty who can't teach effectively. Higher education is costing too much to have amateurs doing the teaching."

"The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements. This investment produces educational resources ranging from innovative curricular resources to workforce training materials to English language learning tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are generally not open to the members of the public who paid for them. At a time when educational opportunity, workforce development and access to knowledge are critical to America's future, these valuable publicly-funded resources should be openly available to students, teachers, businesses, workers and the public to use in new and innovative ways."

"Marketers are proficient in using a content engagement cycle, a practice for deciding when to engage whom with what kind of content during the customer journey. They plan months, quarters and even years in advance to create a content strategy that aligns with business goals and engages their audience pre- and post-sale. L&D professionals on the other hand, often think about each training session or learning program singularly instead of looking at the overall learner experience. Mapping out the learner lifecycle and assigning content that engages them along the way not only helps create unforgettable learning experiences but also aids in the transfer of knowledge after a training session ends. "

"pedagogy has become a much more complicated process that has evolved from an art that one can acquire by oneself to a subject requiring formal preparation. The need for such training is all the more urgent because of the conditions that many graduate students will encounter in their professional careers. Only one-quarter of the recent Ph.D.'s seeking academic careers are finding jobs in research universities. Most of the others obtain positions in institutions with students who tend to be less motivated and less prepared for college than the undergraduates their teachers knew, and teaching them successfully will be a greater challenge."

"In the end, young adults need more education and training -- something the U.S. post-secondary system seems curiously bad at delivering. The U.S. ranks first among developed countries in spending on post-secondary education, but eleventh in the share of young adults (ages 25 to 34) with a college degree."

""I'm a survivor of that teardown mode of the '70s and '80s, that college-for-all thing," he said. This has had the unintended consequence of helping flatten out or steadily erode the share of students taking vocational courses. In California's community colleges, for instance, it's dropped to 28 percent from 31 percent since 2000, contributing to a shortage of trained workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree."

"Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs. As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience shows how a worker's skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references. And elevating skills over pedigree creates new pathways to employment and tailored training and a gateway to the middle class."

"Graduate programs should incorporate more courses focused explicitly on pedagogy. If teaching is 40 - 90% of most full-time faculty jobs in higher ed., pedagogical study should constitute at least 40% of the work graduate students do toward a graduate degree. I was recently laughed at by someone in a traditional academic discipline when I offered this as a provocation, but it feels hardly provocative to me. For some programs, even requiring a single graduate course in pedagogy would be a step in the right direction, but 40% of coursework seems an incredibly reasonable bar (even if also well out of current reach for many programs)."

"Haters can keep hating, but the train has left the station. You can either get on board and help streamline its direction, or you can stand in its way and incrementally slow it down as it plows right through you," threatens Segal.

"To ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. The use of ICT and open educational resources (OER) should be scaled-up in all learning contexts. Teachers need to update their own skills through regular training. The strategy also calls on Member States to strengthen links between education and employers, to bring enterprise into the classroom and to give young people a taste of employment through increased work-based learning. EU Education Ministers are also encouraged to step-up their cooperation on work-based learning at national and European level."

The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students' awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill's course, "Information and Contemplation," goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation-during class-to sharpen their attention.

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

"Each day, our NYC-based team produces one-minute video lessons covering every change to the world's most popular websites, mobile apps and online tools and we deliver those lessons in real-time."

The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) links learning and work. CAEL is a nonprofit that works at all levels within the higher education, public, and private sectors to make it easier for people to get the education and training they need.

"If we shift that focus, then extensive workshops in Blackboard, Moodle or Desire2Learn are unnecessary. Beginning training is enough. Valuable learning time can then be switched to exploring on the open web, to discovering things we can link to that fit with our pedagogy, instead of figuring how to force our pedagogy to fit the LMS features."

Just in time for Creative Commons' 10th birthday celebration of its license suite, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) announced a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new program - Integrated Digital English Acceleration (I-DEA) - that will help adult English language learners improve their language skills while simultaneously providing career and college readiness training through technology-based tools and resources.

While many children's home lives are abuzz with the same platforms and devices as the 21st century workplace, school just hasn't kept pace, and in many classrooms pedagogies are barely more inclusive of new technology than they were in the 1980s. We desperately need to improve on this record, which is why schools need to make hiring educational technology professionals -- whether specially trained classroom teachers or dedicated staffers -- a top priority.