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The popularity and rise in online courses have somewhat taken the author by surprise. Starting as a college instructor three years ago, the author has witnessed the tremendous interest in online programming. In fact, it is the fastest growing enrollment at the kindergarten-12th grade and higher educational levels. At the university level, administrators are directing the design of online courses, faculty members are being drawn to develop these types of courses and students are strongly requesting these courses. However, even though there is this strong movement for online programming, it is relatively new and unfamiliar to most university administrators and faculty members. There is a pressing need to acquire hands-on, practical knowledge, skills and materials for these online courses. Consequently, university faculty is scrambling to find more information, materials and resources to fulfill these online programming interests and needs. This paper will present an overview, teaching/learning techniques, exemplary assignments and activities, and assessment tools for online courses. A literature review, along with best practices associated with online education, is incorporated in the following sections of this paper. The following is appended: Troubled Youth Case Study: An Example of an On-Line Assignment. (Contains 1 table.)

In fall of 2004, Carnegie Mellon University embarked on a bold educational experiment, the establishment of an overseas branch campus at Education City in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Carnegie Mellon's decision to open up shop in the Middle East was by no means unique; indeed, Carnegie Mellon is just one of a growing number of institutions to join the burgeoning overseas branch campus phenomenon. More innovative was Carnegie Mellon's decision, in the fall of 2005, to inaugurate a new academic program that employed cutting edge telecommunications technology to create a real-time, seamless intercontinental learning environment for a pioneer class of twenty three American and Qatari students. Although the class encountered challenges, technological and otherwise, the author believes that U.S.-Arab Encounters may serve as a model for future collaborations between U.S.-based campuses and their increasingly numerous overseas branches. This essay has three primary goals. First, in order to put the U.S.-Arab Encounters experiment into perspective, the author carries out a brief survey of the branch campus phenomenon as a whole, with a particular focus on the reasons for its dramatic expansion in recent years, especially into the Middle East. Secondly, this paper makes a case for the important role that inter-campus courses such as U.S.-Arab Encounters can play in a branch campus setting, particularly in terms of their ability to enhance the inherent advantages offered by overseas branch campuses while simultaneously mitigating some of the problems that those same campuses can pose to the mother institution. Finally, this paper addresses some of the challenges faced in the implementation of this innovative class as a guide to educators who might seek to provide similar inter-campus academic programs in the future. (Contains 2 notes.)

Although there has been a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of charter schools in the research literature, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to English language learners (ELLs) in charter schools. Moreover, the charter school research has predominantly focused on whether or not charter schools are effective rather than "how" or "why" high-performing charter schools work, particularly for ELLs. We contend that researchers must expand their focus beyond access and achievement and begin to grapple with questions related to the quality of programs for ELLs in charter schools. To meet an emerging need in the field, we synthesize several strands of existing research--related to charter schools, school improvement, and ELLs in traditional public schools--to propose a five-component framework that describes essential elements of quality programs for ELLs in charter schools. We conclude with a discussion of implications of our framework for research, policy, and practice.

Federal special education and accountability policies requires that educators individualize instruction for students with disabilities, while simultaneously ensuring that the vast majority of these students meet age-based grade-level standards and assessment targets. In this paper, we examine this dynamic interplay between policies through analysis of policy documents and interviews that reveal how a sample of educators grapple with their simultaneous implementation. We found that educators made sense of some facets of the policies as complementary and others as contradictory. NCLB and IDEA offered consistent and specific guidelines defining "highly qualified" teachers and educators reported a clear and accurate understanding of these policy demands. On an issue where there was no specific guidance from NCLB--the placement of special education students--educators interpreted the law as promoting the inclusion of more students in general education courses, often to an extent that contradicted the guidance offered by IDEA. With respect to fundamental issues of teaching and learning, NCLB and IDEA represent contradictory theories of action and educators perceived conflict and expressed concerns about unintended consequences for students. Based on our empirical findings, we conclude with a set of theoretical propositions regarding how the alignment of policy messages influences educators' interpretation of policies, which in turn may have implications for how they enact policies. (Contains 2 tables.)

Objectives: We argue that the reasons court actors conform to or depart from sentencing guideline recommendations likely vary depending on whether the decision involves an alternative sanction or incarceration and that these reasons may have consequences for ethnoracial disparities in the sentencing of defendants and how these disparities are understood. Method: We use recent (2012–2016) Pennsylvania sentencing data to examine (1) the relationship between defendant race/ethnicity and court actors' decisions to depart downward and upward from the guidelines and (2) whether such relationships vary depending on whether they involve an alternative sanction, namely intermediate punishments (IPs). Results: We find that the association of defendant race/ethnicity with decisions to conform to the guidelines or to depart is greatly impacted by whether the sentence involves an IP. Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Latinos experienced greater disadvantage in guideline decision-making, whether conformity or departures, when the sentence involved an IP. Conclusions: Results suggest that the integration of IP into guideline systems may have (1) mobilized ethnoracial disparities in sentencing, (2) focused the location of sentencing disparities to sentences involving IP, and (3) changed the applicability of common interpretations of guideline decisions and disparities in their imposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reduction of disparity across jurisdictions as one of the goal sentencing reform in the U.S. It provides information regarding the comparison between the Pennsylvania guideline system which considers judges important for fair trial and the federal guideline system which considers them as a source of the problem. It presents the criticism of Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS) and the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) for their approaches.