We’re excited to bring on board Alison Ascher Webber as Director of Strategic Initiatives for our EdTech Center. Alison is a national expert in adult education and mobile learning, having served as the Education Director for Cell-Ed. At Cell-Ed, Alison led user experience, curriculum design, teacher training, and partnership development and helped grow Cell-Ed’s active users from 20 to over 1,000 low-wage agricultural and service economy workers through employer, union, government, and non-profit partnerships. “Mobile learning is an opportunity to provide affordable anytime, anywhere learning to many of the world’s hardest to serve populations,” says Alison. Most recently, as Associate Director at Avasant Foundation she has supported innovative edtech and employment initiatives for youth in the Caribbean, Africa, and India.

Alison has developed curricula, trained teachers, and led adult education programs serving low-wage immigrant workers in California for over 15 years. She brings to World Education deep expertise and experience designing and managing adult education initiatives as the first Executive Director of the Leadership Training & Education Fund and later helping lead the associated statewide non-profit, Building Skills Partnership. The ADVANCE Workplace English and tutoring programs she developed for janitors at leading high-tech companies and universities in Silicon Valley were recognized by the Migration Policy Institute as innovative models for immigrant integration.

Alison was drawn to work at World Education because she believes that “World Education has an incredible opportunity to serve the United States as well as the global community as a leading researcher, implementer and promoter of best practices in educational technologies, and especially for bringing new opportunities to populations often cut off by digital and educational divides.” Alison will work for World Education part-time based in Berkeley, California to connect us to cutting-edge initiatives and funders in California and elsewhere.

Today is Digital Learning Day! Digital Learning Day is a great time to celebrate the ways that technology is being used in our classrooms -- and beyond them. This year, our focus for Digital Learning Day is blended learning. Read on for courses, webinars, and other resources to explore best practices in blended learning.

For this week only, we are sharing our 3-hour self-paced multimedia course, Introduction to Blended Learning, to any who wish to try it out. The course will be available through March 2. Click here to get started!

Introduction to Blended Learning is one of three Special Topics courses that are part of the IDEAL Consortium’s member resources. The IDEAL Consortium, a project of the EdTech Center, brings together states interested in developing distance and blended education programs to meet the online learning needs of adult learners who need to study at a distance or wish to extend learning beyond the classroom. To learn more about the benefits of IDEAL Membership and to see if your state is a member, visit http://ideal.worlded.org.

Want more? Don't stop with the Introduction! Try out out our full length facilitated courses, or revisit the blended learning webinar or handbook.

• Webinar: Blended Learning in the Adult Education Classroom. This archived webinar explored questions such as: What is blended learning? Why could blended learning be useful to your adult education program? What are some different approaches to adding an online learning component? Participants are introduced to a new, free, online guide to the blended learning classroom, written by webinar presenter David J. Rosen and published by Essential Education.

• Newly revised and updated IDEAL Distance Education and Blended Learning Handbook.

• Facilitated online courses:

• Blended and Project-Based Learning
  March 7 – May 2, estimated completion time: 30 hours
  Can you remember how much fun it was to do a project for school – some of my fondest grade school memories were projects. If you haven’t been using project-based learning (PBL) in your classroom, join us to refresh your understanding of project-based learning, while exploring how it could be done in the context of a blending learning approach. Combining new technology tools with project-based learning allows teachers to introduce their classes to problem-solving tasks, enhance learners’ critical thinking, and improve students’ research and communication skill, leveraging both face-to-face and online learning options. Gather together your colleagues (learning is always more fun with a partner) and register today!

• Blended Learning for English Language Learners
  April 26 – May 23, estimated completion time: 12 hours
  Explore how and when to use blended learning to enhance your work with adult English language learners (ELLs). Investigate ways educators have structured their curricula to include one or more blended learning approaches. See examples of how blended learning can be implemented using the free USA Learns website as an example. Leave the course with a draft lesson that uses blended learning in either face-to-face or distance settings. Register today!

Did you miss our Building Integrated Education and Training Programs: Tested Strategies and New Endeavors NCTN and NELRC webinar series? Drawn from around the country, presenters described their local context and program design and discussed the impact of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) on program choices.

The archived recordings are now available!