The following are highlights from our past month’s Current Awareness alerts and  are selected from the various categories which we source the latest information and resources.

 

Distance Education 

Definitions of Digital and Distance Education  

 WCET, a largely US and Canadian based cooperative seen as leaders in the practice & policy of digital learning in higher education in their region, provides a brief analysis, in this blog post, of the recent studies on how institutions worldwide are grappling with online and distance education definitions. This reported viewed from Faculty, administrators and student’s perspectives as well as from a policy view. 

 

Language and Literacy

The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction 

In this policy brief, Paul Thomas of Furman University explores the controversial history of the reading reform movement. 

Digitising heritage: How one project is making our multilingual history accessible 

A news article describing the Five Hundred Year Archive, a digital project steered by UCT and Rhodes University, which is aimed at making South Africa's history available in indigenous languages through  digitising historical resources.  

 

Open Education and Open Educational Resources 

(Open) Educational Resources around the World - An International Comparison 

This e-book is a collection of the full country reports and working papers created by the Centre for Open Education Research (COER) members from the countries that were included in the study within of the research project EduArc on distributed learning infrastructures for OER and digital learning content in higher education.  

Open Educational Resources Advocacy Toolkit  

This OER Advocacy Toolkit was designed as a reference to support academic librarians in advocating for the creation and re-use of open educational resources (OER) at their institution. It contains information; resources; checklists and practice-based ideas for communicating with and advocating to OER stakeholders such as academics, librarians, teaching and learning committees and university executives. 

 

Teaching and Learning

Smart Education Strategies for Teaching and Learning: Critical analytical framework and case studies  

This publication, prepared by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) with the support of UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education and the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University (SLIBNU), provides an overview of the field of smart education and the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning; a conceptual framework and the methodology adopted for the research analysis of 10 selected national and related supranational policy texts on information and communication technologies in education and smart education policy along with 15 case studies of selected policy-informed implementation projects. It also includes a policy template and monitoring and evaluation questions. 

From learning recovery to education transformation  

This new joint report by UNESCO, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), UNICEF, The World Bank and The OECD, presents findings from the fourth round of the Survey on National Education Responses to COVID-19 School Closures, administered between April–July 2022 with responses from Ministries of Education in 93 countries. It explores how countries are progressing in the RAPID actions to recover learning: Reach every child and keep them in school; Assess learning levels regularly; Prioritize teaching the fundamentals; Increase the efficiency of instruction; and Develop psychosocial health and wellbeing.