Factors that drive delivery mode decisions are multifaceted and often necessarily go beyond instructional design needs. Additional influencing factors include logistical, technical, and policy considerations. The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the many opportunities and challenges that accompany the chosen distance delivery mode, prompting the need…

A core element of systems thinking is perspective taking. Perspectives help people distinguish between salient and irrelevant information, take particular types of actions, and make sense of the world. In this article, we consider what systems thinking and perspective taking means for designers in education. First, we present a framework,…

This article presents the results of a collective case study exploring how K12 practitioners perceive the interaction of systems thinking, creativity, and learning from failure within their professional practice. In order to identify K12 practitioners who were well-versed in systems thinking, we targeted students within an instructional design and…

Digital learning platforms (DLPs) are beginning to become open to research. Specifically, in our work in SEERNet, developers are extending five platforms, each used in either K-12 or higher education by more than 100,000 users, to enable third-party researchers to explore, develop, and test improvements. SEERNet seeks to enable equity-relevant…

Purpose: Education is a key institution of modern society, long recognized for its central role in the reproduction of inequities and with the potential to challenge them. Schools behave as their systems are designed. Achieving equity and excellence is not possible through attempts to fix "the school" or educators. Principles of systemic…

Literature indicates that there is limited research on the national and organizational level decision processes to develop and deliver e-learning programs. In this paper, existing e-learning literature is analyzed in terms of national level factors (national culture, readiness for new technology, and infrastructure), organizational level factors…

The Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent release of oil into the Gulf of Mexico created an ecological disaster of immense proportions. The estimates of the amounts of oil, whether for the amount released per day or the total amount of oil disgorged from the well, call on numbers so large they defy the capacity of most…

For the forty-second time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two volumes. Volume 1 contains papers dealing…

To solve two enduring problems in education--unacceptably large variation in learning opportunities for students across classrooms and little continuing improvement in the quality of instruction--the authors propose a system that centers on the creation of shared instructional products that guide classroom teaching. By examining systems outside…

Artificial intelligence research on creative design has led to Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) models that emphasize functions as abstractions for organizing understanding of physical systems. Empirical studies on understanding complex systems suggest that novice understanding is shallow, typically focusing on their visible structures and…

More stakeholders are turning to technology to advance the professional learning required to support new standards and evaluation systems. Yet how technology is used will determine its potential to influence educator practice and results for students. This brief outlines how technology can enhance professional learning, offers examples of how…

Representations such as drawings, graphs, and computer simulations, are central to learning and doing science. Furthermore, ongoing success in science learning requires students to build on the representations and associated practices that they are presumed to have learned throughout their schooling career. Without these practices, students have…

The purpose of this study was to investigate four attractor states in schools through the perceptions of formal leaders that engaged in and reflected upon school reform regarding the Millennial generation. The term attractor was used as a metaphor for a habitual pattern, gleaned from complexity science which informs of new ways in which to…

Increasingly, educators and trainers are challenged within their respective organizations to provide for the efficient distribution of instructional content using instructional media. The appropriate selection of instructional media to support distance learning is not intuitive and does not occur as a matter of personal preference. On the…

This article presents seven vignettes that focus on what technology specialists, instructional designers, teacher trainers, teachers, parents, corporate trainers and performance technologists can do to create positive and systemic change in education. These include: (1) "What Technology Specialists Can Do," by Brian Beabout; (2) "What…