Donald Maclean's List: Continuing Professional Development

"The Professional Development Forum was established in1998 following the publication of the National Guidelines by the then Scottish Office. The aim of the Forum is tofacilitate and enhance the training and continuing professional development of further education lecturers in Scotland through the approval of the provision of high quality units of \ninitial teacher training and continuing professional development which meet the needs of the individual and the profession."

"Scotland's Colleges exists to support, represent and promote Scotland's 43 colleges who are at the forefront of lifelong learning, education, training and skills."

A toolkit to support the introduction of the Public Library Quality Improvement Matrix has been developed by SLIC and contains:
Sources of evidence
Links to other quality evaluation frameworks
Mapping tool of quality indicators to specific service strands Illustrations at level 2 (weak) and level 4 (good)
Questionnaire for use with the public
Best practice, including templates from pilot authorities
Presentation for use with staff
Guidance for staff training

The JISC e-Learning Programme is funding two major programmes on Curriculum Design and Curriculum Delivery.The two programmes will run alongside each other and there will be opportunities for collaborative working between the two programmes will be actively encouraged through the Support and Synthesis project.

"JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East has recently published the latest version of its Electronic Training Needs Analysis (ETNA) analysis. Those involved in any kind of tertiary education should find valuable strategic information in the free, 123-page report."

"This is a back-to-basics article about the undervalued and little-discussed
multiple choice question. It’s not as exciting as discussing 3D virtual learning
environments, but it might be just as important. If you need to use tests, then
you want to reduce the errors that occur from poorly written items."

Times Educational Supplement online. Jobs, resources and communities. Free, but registration required. Mostly aimed at schools in terms of resources, but could be useful for Core Skills. Many FE jobs appear in the TES.

EDUCAUSE publications address a diverse range of professional challenges in higher education IT, from updates on current developments to explorations of important overarching issues. Listed below are the full range of research, reports and other publications that EDUCAUSE and its members have written about ELI 7 Things You Should Know. Excellent quality, short papers on everything from ebooks and ebook readers, through blogs, wikis, social networking and educational apps.

Service development and Self-Evaluation for library and information services in Scottish Further Education colleges (PDF) is the latest SLIC guidance for self evaluation in the sector (also available as a word document). It has been produced in consultation with HMIe, JISC and the college community of practice. The guidance is mapped to the latest HMIe framework which is built around 'light touch' review arrangements, the shift in emphasis from quality 'improvement' to 'enhancement' and the dropping of 'grades' in favour of 'confidence statements'. For the first time there is an explicit requirement on colleges to report on support services and our guidance is intended to assist with this process.

Free resources, ideas and lesson plans for teaching with technology.

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know About... series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:
What it is
How it works
Where it is going
Why it matters to teaching and learning
*Wonderful set of guides*.

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone - from children to college students to professionals - organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.

Web2Rights is a JISC project, funded from 1st November 2007 - 31st March 2009, whose purpose was initially to develop practical, pragmatic and relevant Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and other legal issues toolkits to support the projects funded within the JISC Users and Innovation Programme (U&I) in their engagement with next generation technologies. \nThe Web2Rights team, comprised of lawyers, consultants, learning technologists and pedagogic experts focussed upon the need to address cultural and practical obstacles in engaging with Web2.0, IPR and other legal issues. Working in close collaboration with JISC Legal and focussing upon the specific issues raised by the U&I community of users, they have created a number of resources to address a variety of legal issues which might arise.

Academic Earth now helps connect you to degrees and certificates that can be earned online from highly-respected universities. Browse through our collections to find the right program for you.

The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others.

"Open2.net is the online learning portal from The Open University and the BBC."

In creating OER Recommender and OCW Finder our goal was to provide a means for educators and students to easily find and access NSDL and OpenCourseWare open educational resources (OERs) that meet their individual needs. The OER Recommender widget added the ability for users to discover "like" resources while exploring pages of interest. By recruiting partners to provide metadata for pertinent and vetted educational resources, we continue to expand the range of content that can be found using our services.

Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 5226 journals in the directory. Currently 2175 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 428813 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

"Resources and networks for learning and teaching"