Curriculum Resources

Technology and Learning

The Annenberg/CPB Project
The Annenberg/CPB Project helps colleges, universities, high schools and community organizations use telecommunications technologies to improve learning for all students. The Project begun in 1981 at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with funding from the Annenberg School of Communications, and was joined by the Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project. The Annenberg/CPB Project has influenced individuals' and educational institutions' use of public television and video, and has pioneered the use of computer and information technologies to make education more accessible for all students. The web site includes links to educational technology strategies.

Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education
Headquartered at the University of Virginia, the AACE runs conferences and workshops on educational computing, publishes several journals, and sponsors various affiliated groups, such as the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) and the division on Educational Telecommunications (ED-TELECOM).

"Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free" by Carey Goldberg
This article, published in the April 4, 2001 issue of the New York Times, describes the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgoy's new 10-year initiative, OpenCourseWare, which will create public Web sites for almost all of its 2,000 courses and post materials like lecture notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, and video lectures. MIT intends to post virtually all its course materials on the Web, making it generally available at no cost. The materials are not for-credit courses; rather, they comprise one electronic set of courses that will allow students to see how they flow into each other, to search the whole repository, and to move from one to the next through cross-references.

Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The mission of the Center for Academic Transformation is to serve as a source of expertise and support for those in higher education who wish to take advantage of the capabilities of information technology to transform their academic practices. The Center includes a Leadership Forum, sponsored by Blackboard, Inc., Eduprise, SCT, SMARTHINKING, and WebCT, that produces a monthly electronic newsletter written by Carol Twigg and Bob Heterick of EDUCOM, The Learning MarketSpace, which provides assessment of and thinking about issues and developments concerning the nexus of higher education and information technology.

Center for Technology in Learning
Created in the early 1990s, the Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) studies issues of how to effectively use technologies to support learning. The Center was established within SRI's Policy Division, where it is closely allied with ongoing education and health research programs. SRI was founded as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946 to promote and foster the application of science in the development of commerce, trade and industry for the prosperity of mankind. It is now one of the world's largest independent, nonprofit research, technology development and consulting organizations.

The Collaboratory Project, Northwestern University
Funded by a grant from Ameritech, the Collaboratory Project is establishing an easy-to-use, network-based collaborative environment to support education, which enables education, research, cultural, nonprofit, business, and industry communities in the greater Chicago region to work together to share information, resources, and expertise. The Collaboratory Project is part of Northwestern University's Information Technology organization and works with individual teachers, school project teams, and multi-school collaborations in the Chicago schools, suburban school districts, and districts throughout Illinois. In addition, the project works with museums, libraries, and cultural institutions to develop innovative, web-based educational resources.

EDUCAUSE
EDUCAUSE is an association that emerged from the consolidation of two organizations, CAUSE and Educom, on July 1, 1998. Existing at the intersection of higher education and information technology, EDUCAUSE has as its mission to help shape and enable transformational change in higher education through the introduction, use, and management of information resources and technologies in teaching, learning, scholarship, research, and institutional management. EDUCAUSE focuses on the management and use of computational, network, and information resources in support of higher education's missions of scholarship, instruction, service, and administration. This organization attempts to bridge the academy and industry.

The Gateway to Educational Materials
Sponsored by the the U.S. Department of Education's National Library of Education, The Gateway to Educational Materials is a special project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology. The NLE and the U.S. Department of Education have created this database of Internet-based educational materials in order to provide educators with quick and easy access to their growing consortium of institutions' collections of educational resources such as lesson plans, activities, and curriculum units.

History Matters
A project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, History Matters assists social studies and history teachers at high schools and colleges around the world by providing a non-commercial starting point for exploring the web and offering an array of teaching resources that are grounded in the latest scholarship. Resources include an annotated guide to the most useful web sites for U.S. history and social studies teachers.

National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) is a diverse coalition of cultural organizations dedicated to ensuring the greatest participation of all parts of the cultural community in the digital environment. NINCH's goal is the creation of an environment in which people and institutions everywhere can network their cultural resources and receive encouragement and support in doing so. NINCH's mission is to advocate for the inclusion of the cultural sector in all policy deliberations on the future of the information infrastructure and to educate policymakers, coalition members and the general public about developing a connected, distributed and accessible collection of cultural knowledge. NINCH's work includes community building to create a membership coalition across the breadth of the arts and humanities community and to attend to diverse cultures and the needs of those unable to become members; working with members and advocacy partners to ensure that the contributions and the needs of the arts and humanities community are included in all legislation and policy deliberations concerning our digital future by Congress, government agencies and other institutions (e.g. universities, museums and others); and creating an interactive information and communications infrastructure and instruments dedicated to educating its constituency about digital networking developments, in the U.S. and abroad.

Teaching, Learning, & Technology Group (TLT)
An affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), the TLT Group is perhaps the most widely-know resource for institutions wishing to make better use of instructional technologies. The core work of TLT is the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable (TLTR) Program, which organizes groups of faculty, staff, and administrators to coordinate local efforts to integrate technology into the curriculum. TLT also offers workshops, a consulting service, an online discussion group, and, through the Flashlight Program, a number of tools for campus-based technology assessment. The Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI), which provides information and guidance on access-to-information technologies by individuals with disabilities, is another of TLT projects.

ERIC Crib Sheet on Technology in the Classroom
CRIB Sheets are brief selected ERIC bibliographies on topics of interest in the field of higher education.  This bibliography highlights some of the key issues related to technology implementation in the classroom: the changing faculty role; implementation within different disciplines; and training and development.

"The Age of Virtual Learning?" By Carol Geary Schneider, Education Week April 26, 2000
This editorial argues that both tests and technologies be put to more productive uses than high-stakes tests and high-speed courses.

Center for Innovative Learning Technologies
The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is a distributed center designed to serve as a national resource for stimulating research on innovative, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 learning. Its approach is to foster and conduct collaborative research and development in areas believed to promise significant advances in learning.

The Pros and Cons of Technology in the Classroom
This page offers a threaded discussion on issues on the value and role of computing technology in K-12 classrooms. Transcripts of speeches given to a gathering of organizations that fund school reform projects by two nationally recognized experts on the subject, Dr. Roy Pea and Dr. Larry Cuban, are provided as context for the debate.

MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.

"Online Education: New Paradigms for Learning and Teaching" by Greg Kearsley
This article from The Technology Source, August 1998, analyzes courses that won the Paul Allen Foundation Virtual Education contest for outstanding online courses in higher education.  The author describes some of the salient characteristics of these online courses, the issues they raise about online education, and the apparent direction of online education in higher education.  The courses discussed here provide a window into the current state of the art, and provide indications of the future.

"Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses" by Charles Graham, Kursat Cagiltay, Byung-Ro Lim, Joni Craner, and Thomas M. Duffy
This article, written by a team of scholars from Indiana University's Center for Research on Learning and Technology in the March/April 2001 issue of The Technology Source, adapts Chickering and Gamson's renowned "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" to online teaching and learning and shares the authors' results for the assessment of online courses. (Note: This article was originally published in The Technology Source as: Charles Graham, Kursat Cagiltay, Byung-Ro Lim, Joni Craner, and Thomas M. Duffy "Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses." The Technology Source, March/April 2001.

Technology Applied to Classroom Assessment
Compiled by Tom Creed for the Virtual Companion accompanying the article "TechnoCATs" in The National Teaching and Learning Forum, Vol. 7 No. 5, this list provides links to resources for those interested in using technology to enhance and extend their use of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs).  The web sites listed include general descriptions of classroom assessment; articles and presentations on classroom assessment; and examples of TechnoCATS.

AAC&U offers these resources only as possible models of interest and has not submitted each of them to any substantial peer or quality review. If you have questions about any particular resource, please contact the institution sponsoring it directly.