In December 2008, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and in partnership with the Data Quality Campaign, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) hosted a meeting of the West's key leaders in building state-wide integrated longitudinal data systems. Such data systems are essential to developing a better…

Increasingly, IT organizations will move from providing IT services locally to becoming an integrator of IT services--some provided locally and others provided outside the institution. As a result, institutions must immediately begin to plan for shared services and must understand the essential role that identity management and trust services play…

This study investigates EFL learners' dialogues in synchronous task-based computer-mediated communication (CMC). The focus is on whether learners engage each other in text-based dialogues regarding the language use in pursuit of the task goal in the CMC context and how their mutual engagement impacts their language learning. Sixteen Chinese…

Schools are often in need of low-cost, high-impact strategies to improve student behavior in school common areas. While many behavior management programs exist, there are few resources available to guide the implementation of these programs and ensure they are grounded in evidence-based strategies. Therefore, the current study had two primary…

State policymakers are increasingly focused on closing the achievement gap and preparing all students to succeed in school and in life. However, college and career readiness begins long before students enter high school or even a classroom. Differences in children's abilities appear as early as the first year of life, and research has shown that…

Web 2.0 is the term used to describe a group of web-based creativity, information-sharing, and collaboration tools including wikis, blogs, social networks, and folksonomies. The common thread in all of these tools is twofold: They enable collaboration and information sharing, and their impact on higher education has been dramatic. A recent study…

This proposed research is part of an on-going line of research of developing questionnaire instruments for use at the elementary school level. Because field trials often use child self-report as outcome measures and sometimes determine implementation fidelity using such measures, evaluation of the validity of the use of such measures with…

Many web 2.0 sites are extremely popular and contain vast amounts of content, but how much of this content is useful in academia? This exploratory paper investigates the potential use of the popular web 2.0 image site Flickr as an academic image resource. The study identified images tagged with any one of 12 subject names derived from recognized…

This paper identifies a set of universal instructional design (UID) principles appropriate to distance education (DE) and specifically tailored to the needs of instructional designers and instructors teaching online. These principles are then used to assess the accessibility level of a sample online course and the availability of options in its…

Arizona State University (ASU) has become a foundational model for the New American University; committed to excellence, access and impact in everything it does. ASU's faculty and staff members measure themselves by those they include, not by those they exclude; pursue research that contributes to the public good; and assume major responsibility…

This study investigated the use of online after-hours eMentoring as a nontraditional student support and retention strategy. The term eMentoring describes online support delivered to students electronically and through Learning Management Systems. An online university providing eMentors for student support was compared with a traditionally modeled…

The purpose of an information strategy is to highlight the extent to which a modern, complex organization depends on information, in all of its guises, and to consider how this strategic asset should be managed. This dependency has always been present and nowhere more so than in universities, whose very purpose is built around information and its…

This article presents a detailed description of the powerful and necessary role which technology can play in the information-age paradigm of education described in the four articles comprising this series. This article calls for a learning management system (LMS), a comprehensive and integrated application of technology to the learning process,…

During the past several years, school systems have implemented a variety of organizational improvement initiatives, such as Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecards, Baldrige Criteria, activity-based costing, and managing for results. Unfortunately, evidence of sustained success is fleeting as school districts remain trapped in a time warp of command,…

Education systems all over the world, like all other organisations, have certain organisational goals that they set and wish to achieve. It is argued that for increased pupil performance, in the case of education systems, teachers must work harder and smarter. A performance system is regarded as part of the process to achieve this organisational…