Concepts

Anchored Instruction
The anchored instruction approach is an attempt to help students become more actively engaged in learning by situating or anchoring instruction around an interesting topic. The learning environments are designed to provoke the kinds of thoughtful engagement that helps students develop effective thinking skills and attitudes that contribute to effective problem solving and critical thinking.

Authentic Activity
Authentic activities use real-world resources in an activity such as authentic resources, experiences, and sharing. Authentic activities are useful beyond the classroom walls.

Authentic Assessment
Authentic assessment refers to assessment tasks that resemble reading and writing in the real world and in school (Hiebert, Valencia & Afflerbach, 1994; Wiggins, 1993). Its aim is to assess many different kinds of literacy abilities in contexts that closely resemble actual situations in which those abilities are used. For example, authentic assessments ask students to read
real texts, to write for authentic purposes about meaningful topics, and to participate in authentic literacy tasks such as discussing books, keeping journals, writing letters, and revising a piece of writing until it works for the reader. Both the
material and the assessment tasks look as natural as possible. Furthermore, authentic assessment values the thinking behind work, the process, as much as the finished product.

Cognitive Apprenticeship
A cognitive apprenticeship is a one-on-one mentoring relationship that involves substantive conversations. The mentor teaches the student critical thinking skills and problem solving skills.

Community of Learners (COL)
A community of learners includes anyone and any thing (resource) that is involved in working towards a learning goal. These people and things don’t necessarily have to be in close proximity or within the same classroom.

Cooperative and Collaborative Learning
Cooperative and collaborative learning involves students working together, but differs greatly from group work. Collaborative learning actually involves substantive conversations, where students work together to reach goals, actively participating in
group work and coming away from it with a different perspective on the issue.

Distributed Intelligence
Distributed intelligence refers to intelligence spread across the system. If you remove a part of the system, you lose a
significant amount of information. This idea supports the idea that not all information lies in the teacher’s head. If you don’t
get everyone involved, you will miss out on something.

Expert System
An expert system is a computer-based system that holds all information that a human expert would have on a topic.

Generative Learning
Generative learning involves students being presented with a situation and having to determine what the problem(s) are and search for solutions, using their critical thinking and problem solving skills.

Higher-order Thinking Skills (HOTS)
Higher-order thinking involves understanding complex concepts and applying sometimes conflicting information to solve a problem, which may have more than one correct answer.

Instructional Technology
Instructional technology is simply the use of technology to educate or teach something.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Intelligent tutoring systems are technology-based applications that can determine a learner’s strengths and weaknesses and diagnose what areas that learner needs additional work in.

Learner Control
Learner control is an attractive component of web-based instruction or other interactive instruction that allows the learner to control sequence, content, learning activities and pacing. Ideally, the instruction should take a profile of the learner's
experiences and ability to best meet learner's needs.

Media Attributes
Media attributes include TV, video, audio, animation, graphics, etc. These attributes create a rich learning environment that appeal to a variety of learning characteristics.

Microworlds
Microworlds are simulated environments.

Mindtools
Mindtools are tools that reduce cognitive load. Pencil and paper are a classic example.

Multiple Perspectives
Instructors take different approaches to problems, presenting different ideas and methods, allowing their students to see problems from different points of view.

Problem Based Learning
Students are presented with a problem and come up with their own solutions, using critical thinking and problem solving skills.

Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal teaching is a role-playing situation in which the learner “teaches” the teacher about a certain topic.

Scaffolds
A scaffold refers to aid that a learner receives as he/she is just beginning to learn a new task. Scaffolds are gradually taken away as he/she progresses and becomes better at the task at hand. Eventually scaffolds are eliminated and the learner
is able to successfully complete the task without any help.

Self-regulated Learning
Self-regulated learning involves consistent monitoring and modifying of one’s behaviors, in order to maximize learning.

Situated Cognition
Situated cognition involves learning a task in the actual environment where it happens. Dr. Bradshaw offered the perfect example of learning how to dive in a swimming pool.

Substantive Conversation
A substantive conversation is a conversation that results in the learner’s altered view of the problem. The learner comes
away from this conversation with a deeper understanding of the topic at hand and perhaps a broader, more open-minded perspective.

Systematic Design
Systematic design is pre-instructional planning that involves ISD process… task, needs, and audience analyses, objectives
and goal development, etc.

Visual Literacy
Visual literacy refers to the ability to, not only communicate outwardly, but to also recognize and understand incoming visuals.

Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
the process of using computers to enhance communication between students, instructors, experts and learning resources. Includes hypermedia, e-mail, conferencing, bulletin boards, listservers, internet, world wide web, audioconferencing and videoconferencing. By using computer technology to communicate; e-mail, asynchronous discussion boards, synchronous discussions (i.e. chatting).Computer-Mediated Communication is a process of human communication via computers,
involving people, situated in particular contexts, engaging in processes to shape media for a variety of purposes.

Critical Thinking
The ability to acquire information, analyze and evaluate it, and reach a conclusion or answer by using logic and reasoning skills.
The disciplined ability and willingness to assess evidence and claims, to seek a breadth of contradicting as well as confirming information, to make objective judgments on the basis of well supported reasons as a guide to belief and action, and to
monitor one’s thinking while doing so (metacognition). The thinking process that is appropriate for critical thinking depends
on the knowledge domain (e.g.: scientific, mathematical, historical, anthropological, economic, philosophical, moral) but the universal criteria are: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound empirical evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth and fairness. A complex set of cognitive skills employed in problem-solving and intellectual consideration and innovation. Critical thinking requires mental agility and thoughtful consideration: one must, almost simultaneously, be able to process and then analyze what is being presented, to make connections between various bits of information, to draw
inferences from what has been stated directly, to question any assumptions and connections made, and to remain generally skeptical until sufficient proof is offered.

Distance Education
a formal learning activity which occurs when students and instructor are separated by geographic distance or by time, often supported by communications technology such as television, videotape, computers or mail

HyperText
any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed.

HyperMedia
The combination of text, video, graphic images, sound, hyperlinks, and other elements in the form typical of Web documents. Essentially, hypermedia is the modern extension of hypertext, the hyperlinked, text–based documents of the original Internet. Hypermedia attempts to offer a working and learning environment that parallels human thinking—that is, one in which the
user can make associations between topics, rather than move sequentially from one to the next, as in an alphabetic list. For
example, a hypermedia presentation on navigation might include links to astronomy, bird migration, geography, satellites, and radar.

Instructional Strategy
the method of instruction selected to maximize student learning. Instructional strategies are the techniques, methods,
sequences, media, and other means used to teach things to learners.

Interaction / Interactivity
The degree to which the user engages with the multimedia program.

Learner Centered Design
Learner Centered Design focuses the design of instruction on the needs and characteristics of the learners who will be
involved in receiving the instruction. The design thus is adapted to the needs of the learners rather than the instructor or the curriculum being of foremost importance. The idea is to tailor the instructional presentations, activities, and assessments to
suit the learners of individual and group characteristics, which may change as they progress through the instruction.

Metacognition
knowledge of one’s own knowledge and cognitive processes, and the ability to actively monitor and consciously regulate them. The concepts of self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-regulation, self-control, self-instruction, self-consciousness, and meta-attention all belong to metacognition. Metacognition is very important for humans. It guides people to select, evaluate, revise, and abandon cognitive tasks, goals, and strategies

Transactional Distance
the universe of teacher-learner relationships that exist when learners and instructors are separated by space and/or by time. Factors influencing transactional distance are: the interaction between learners and teachers, the structure of the instructional program, and the self-directedness of the learner.Moore says that the separation between instructor and learner leads to
special patterns of learner and teacher behaviors, a psychological and communications space between the two, and the potential for misunderstanding.Ø Transactional distance is relative and different for each person and exists to some degree
even in a traditional classroom environment.

Zone of Proximal Development
The Zone of proximal development is the point during which a student can learn to do an exercise if properly guided. In
this phase, the student cannot complete the task alone, but he/she can be successful with the guidance of an expert. The
student then can do the task more and more independently through the use of scaffolding until he/she is able to complete
the task alone