This volume draws lessons from the education systems of a selection of top-scoring and rapidly improving countries as measured by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). While this volume relates these lessons to the education reform agenda in the United States, they…

Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) of India uses multiple media and modes for reaching out to its distant learners. For most of the programmes offered to these learners, print is the master medium and other media supplement it. Instructions for the Bachelor in Education (B.Ed.), one of the popular programmes of IGNOU, are also…

Educational interventions that are currently in vogue in higher education settings are based upon constructivist approaches, whereby students learn content within the context of authentic activities and problem-based scenarios. Certainly these approaches have value, but proponents of these approaches have been somewhat successful in convincing…

This article describes a framework for managing the life cycle of knowledge in organizations. The framework emerges from years of work with the laboratories and facilities that are under the direction of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The article begins by describing the instructional systems design (ISD) process and how it is used to…

To understand how teacher education might build the knowledge it needs, the editors of this issue investigate how organizations outside of education create and maintain "self-improving" systems that enable them to learn how to get better at what they do. To learn about knowledge building in teacher education, the research reported here also looks…

In this article, the author attempts to show how French disciplinary "didactiques" were created and have developed. At the beginning, nobody could forecast the future and whether the "didactiques" would one day be recognised by the academic and instructional systems. The French "didactiques" are strongly based on…

The interactions between levels of learner prior knowledge and effectiveness of different instructional techniques and procedures have been intensively investigated within a cognitive load framework since mid-90s. This line of research has become known as the expertise reversal effect. Apart from their cognitive load theory-based prediction and…

With the resources provided by communication technologies, E-learning has been employed in multiple universities, as well as in wide range of training centers and schools. This book presents a structured collection of chapters, dealing with the subject and stressing the importance of E-learning. It shows the evolution of E-learning, with…

Legislation, research, and practice support access to technology by young children with disabilities. Yet barriers to technology use--lack of training, inadequate funding, failure to acknowledge technology as a relevant issue, or disbelief that technology can positively impact young children with disabilities--often prevail among many disciplines…

This research study examined how a multinational company determined what the critical success factors (CSFs) were for developing global e-learning. The study analyzed how these CSFs were grouped together in order to make their management more efficient. There were 21 participants in the study who were key stakeholders and came from one of four…

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to define verbally the six elements of education treated by the author; second, by replacing the verbally-defined elements with symbols, to depict various educational patterns distinguished by the inclusion of, exclusion of, and the relationship between, these elements." (Author)

A multi-stakeholder-driven model for excellence in higher education curriculum development has been developed. It is based on the assumption that current efforts to curriculum development take place within a framework of limited stakeholder consultation. A total of 18 multiple stakeholders are identified, including learners, alumni, government,…

A survey of the development of instructional systems in the Soviet Union. (Editor)

This paper examines the relevancy of the concept of accountability and discusses three main forms that accountability may take. (AK)

Describes Instructional Systems Design (ISD) and the subjectively assesses the worth of the approach by briefly addressing three of the most common complaints against it: (1) Does ISD spoon-feed the learner? (2) Is ISD more concerned with front and analysis than actual production and delivery of instructional material? (3) Is ISD nonhumanistic?…