Current Distance Workshop
Distance Education Comes of Age
2008 Project IDEAL Workshop
This year's Project IDEAL Workshop will be held August 4th-7th in Ann Arbor. Registration will be opened to member states beginning the week of June 9th.
For the last six years IDEAL states have been experimenting with various ways to use distance education to meet the needs of ABE and ESL learners. Partly as a result of these efforts, OVAE approved last summer the use of distance education as a standard option in adult education. Distance learners can now be included in a state's annual NRS reports.
This year's workshop focuses on a number of issues that follow from the new status of distance education:
- Writing state policy on distance education
- Processes for vetting and selecting appropriate distance curricula
- Expanding teacher professional development to maintain quality instructional support
- Models states are using to expand distance education from a small experiment to a statewide service
- NRS guidelines for counting students and adjustments to state data collection systems to track distance learners
- Leadership strategies to guide and motivate local programs
The workshop also includes sessions on Web 2.0 technologies and hands-on training in using IDEAL's teacher professional development course series.