Craft Category: Artifacts

This brief summarizes iNACOL’s New Learning Models, which personalize learning using competency-based approaches. Supported by blended and online learning modalities, teachers use technology to differentiate instruction and engage students in deeper learning.

By adapting instruction to reflect a student’s level of mastery, blended and online models have the potential to keep students engaged and supported as they progress at their own pace. Browse this brief to explore new learning models that lead to higher levels of student learning and attainment.

iNACOL publishes a research agenda on an ongoing basis to continue its work in field-building, capacity-building and knowledge-building. Based on a 2013 survey of the field to identify research needs, iNACOL developed a research approach, including the following:

• Build a collaborative research agenda, including: field experts, the iNACOL Research Committee, the iNACOL Research Special Interest Group, leadership experts, and communities of practice.
• Identify research needs for the field.
• Create the final national research agenda report.

The purpose of this research agenda is to evaluate broad needs across the field and to prioritize future research needs. Browse this report to explore iNACOL’s research agenda and needs across the field.

Explore the latest data concerning online and blended learning, enrollment, access, courses, and key policies indicators. Review online learning statistics, trends, policy issues, and iNACOL strategic priorities.

Obtain a snapshot view of state funding models for both full-time and supplemental online learning programs. Examine this resource now to stay connected with the most recent facts regarding the online learning field.

This report provides educational leaders with a guide describing the benefits of OER, a framework for planning, and strategies for successful collaborative content development.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are tools and techniques used to transmit knowledge that have an impact on teaching and learning and are openly licensed to permit sharing and collaboration. OERs include the following:

• Courses
• Course Modules and Materials
• E-textbooks
• Professional Development
• Rubrics
• Assessments and Tests
• Public Domain Works (produced by public sector)

Analyze this report to gain knowledge of OER benefits, frameworks, and strategies for successful content development in your school.

This report helps policymakers promote collaboration and deeper learning with Open Educational Resources (OER). The authors demonstrate how policymakers are helping teachers to build resources, share educational materials, and personalize instruction by permitting publicly funded learning materials to be shared openly.

Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials licensed in such a way as to permit educators to share, access, and collaborate in order to customize and personalize instruction.

Among the report’s collected policy recommendations, three key principles are required for effective sharing of learning materials:

• Emphasize that all materials create by state, regional, or local entities with public funds will hold an open license.
• Allow states with instructional materials lists to include vetted OER.
• Allow flexible use of funding to support development, maintenance, and infrastructure for OER.

View this report today and learn how policymakers can promote collaboration and sharing of resources in your state, district, and school.

This toolkit from Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) and the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) is for K-12 district, charter, and school leaders to use in the very early stages of conceptualizing and designing a next generation learning program, initiative, or whole school.

Rather than offering a prescriptive model to follow, the toolkit helps educators figure out their own goals in blended, personalized, competency-based learning and the pathway to change that best fits their community and students. It organizes the most helpful publications, websites, and tools available today around four key issues: understanding next generation learning models; planning for and managing change; designing next generation learning opportunities; and engaging the planning team and stakeholders in the process.

Because few practitioner-created tools exist in this emerging field, the toolkit highlights the essential questions to ask throughout the planning and design process as well as the communities of experts, practitioners, and learners to connect with and learn from.

RETHINK: Planning and Designing for K-12 Next Generation Learning Type: pdf

This report, fourth in its series, analyzes blended learning through the lens of disruptive innovation theory. The goal of this paper is to help education leaders anticipate and plan for the likely effects of blended learning in classrooms.

The authors introduce their readers to sustainable disruptive innovation, hybrid models of blended learning, implications for education leaders, and what’s next for the field. Delve into this report now to gain insight into disruptive, sustainable innovation happening in today’s classrooms.

This guidebook by Laura Vanderkam provides crucial guidance to savvy philanthropists looking to transform schools through blended learning. While still very much in its infancy, blended learning is demonstrating promising results, driving a flurry of entrepreneurial activity, and increasing enthusiasm among educators for new ways of teaching and learning.

This poses a challenge for philanthropists. Opportunities for donors to transform schools through blended learning are numerous, but so too are pitfalls. Blended learning done well provides adaptive, rigorous, mastery-based learning for any student, anywhere. Done poorly, it becomes one more example of how the promises of technology can fail to materialize in our schools.

Use this resource to direct your philanthropic giving toward transforming education toward mastery-based models of blended learning.

The Learning Edge: Supporting Student Success in a Competency-Based Learning Environment delves into the fourth element of the definition of competency education: students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.

Understanding how to structure supports is important because learning in a competency-based environment means that students and adults are often on the edge of their comfort zone and competence — the learning edge. Download this paper and learn how innovators are designing school culture, embedding supports and organizing resources to ensure students are progressing and on pace.