While youth and the world have changed greatly, most high schools have changed only slightly. School programs and settings can be opened, individualized, and dispersed, but still provide a sense of community, by adopting open education and open space. Perhaps the best known example of open education is Chicago's Metro High School: the city is its…

Open and distance learning is seen as a viable alternative to provide education for all, particularly in the context of developing countries. Open learning is basically a philosophy, while distance learning is a method of flexible education for the unreached, i.e., socially, economically, physically, and geographically disadvantaged groups of the…

This paper focuses on the ongoing development of an inservice teacher education program for teachers in Albania following the downfall in the early 1990s of a repressive totalitarian regime. The Kualida project's name is an acronym based on the Albanian words for training, distance, and teachers and is very close in sound to the Albanian…

Focuses on quality assurance in open and distance education. Discusses making use of new technologies in ways besides the simple transfer of content; establishing systems of quality assurance and control tailored to universities' needs; four broad principles for developing distance education policies and procedures; and managing change. (AEF)

Information technology tools associated with various educational activities often rely on different models of the needed information, support different cooperative styles, and are based on different media and technologies. The architecture of an open software platform which supports educational activities is presented in this paper. The…

This paper explores how a set of curriculum reforms in the United States and England over the past 20 years may be interrelated, according to conclusions drawn from ethnographic investigation and informed by historical reflections. The discussion centers upon the case of informal, open, or progressive education, which has enjoyed a 40 plus--year…

The study looks at the way in which survey research has helped at different stages in the life of the Open University in Great Britain. Since Open University students are studying at a distance, the major source of information about them and about the way they study has been from survey research. This research has provided an input to academic…

This paper, which presents a comparison of informal and formal preschool programs, describes the arguments used by proponents of the formal, more structured, teacher-centered programs and the informal, more child-centered, programs. Some of the evidence for the effects of early experience on child development and for the effects of teaching style…

This report comes out of the 1974 Teacher Corps Conference, which was held to acquaint Teacher Corps personnel with new ideas to enhance their abilities to train interns to work with children with special needs. The first part of the report is composed of 18 speeches on topics such as: community involvement in education, ethnic diversity,…

In this paper the author describes the structure, operations, and problems of a year-long, full time, experimental, environmental awareness program at the University of Montana. The program was designed so that students and faculty would work together in a loosely structured, integrated learning experience, with the usual authority structures…

Attendance in "open" versus "traditional" schools is shown to have small positive effects on student satisfaction with school life and student self-reliance, while differences in family authority structures are found to be of much more importance for these outcomes when student social class characteristics are statistically controlled. Two…

This paper describes an investigation of procedures by which teachers can elicit objectives from students. A programmed course was written to develop competencies related to behavioral goal-setting. Four open-school teachers from each grade-cluster (1-4, 5-8, 9-12) were randomly assigned to two groups. Each teacher interviewed and established two…

This study explored the priorities of kindergarten teachers in Austria along with the factors determining implementation of their educational objectives. A large-scale empirical survey of the conditions fostering and hindering child development in the kindergarten environment was conducted by the Charlotte Buhler Institute in 1994. A total of…

This paper presents an approach for developing flexible Hypermedia Learning Environments (HMLE) and applies this theoretical framework to the creation of a layered model of a hypermedia system, called HyperDisc, developed at the German Institute for Research on Distance Education. The first section introduces HMLE and suggests that existing…

To examine the cultural context and theoretical basis of an educational system similar to the British infant school approach, this study undertook observation and analysis of a British middle school practicing what is called "informal education" (to differentiate it from other similar innovations such as open education, individualized…