RESOURCES
The 9th Edition of the IDEAL Distance and Digital Education Handbook provides guidance on setting up distance and digital education opportunities in adult foundational education programs. The organization of the Handbook chapters reflects important programmatic considerations, including: recruitment, screening, orientation, instruction, and assessment. The guidance provided and reflection required in each chapter support the development of practical plans for distance and digital education including pure distance, hybrid, blended, HyFlex, and remote live instruction implementation. The end goal for readers of the Handbook is crafting a distance digital education program planning document. This edition builds on lessons learned from innovations developed in response to COVID-19 school closures and decisions programs made to sustain innovations after the pandemic, adds information about HyFlex course creation and implementation and Generative Artificial Intelligence integration, and includes insights about attending to equity in distance and digital education programming.
By Jen Vanek, Destiny Simpson, Rachel Riggs, Jeff Goumas, Jamie Harris, & Jerry Yamashita, Published by World Education, 2024.
Contents include:
Recruitment: Identifying and Recruiting Students
- Decide who, where, and how to find learners for your distance or blended learning program
Assessing Readiness: Determining What Supports Students Need to Succeed in Distance and Blended Learning
- Understand the level and types of support that each learner needs
Orientation: Setting Up Learners for Success
- Design an orientation that provides students with the necessary information and skills for a successful learning experience and a plan for reaching goals
Instruction: Getting Started
- Learn about characteristics of involved instruction and how they are represented in different distance education models (e.g., supported distance and blended learning), the teacher role, and how to provide motivating and supportive feedback on students’ work
- Consider how to develop teacher-created curricula and make use of Open Educational Resources (OER)
- Learn about strategies and resources to support the responsible use of Generative AI
- Deepen understanding of how to make best use of tools like learning management systems and online curricula.
Assessment: Student Participation and Progress
- Build awareness of the different purposes assessment serves
- Explore multiple ways to gauge learner progress, including information needed to include distance learners in the National Reporting System (NRS)
Administrative Issues: Getting Started with Distance Education
- Learn how distance education is linked to WIOA guidelines and prioritized adult education initiatives
- Examine issues faced by administrators in implementing and sustaining distance education programs as part of their agency’s educational offerings
- Better understand how to monitor data and distance education program performance