Glossary

From Edupedia

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• Academy

Please see Oversight Academies in the menu on the left.

• Academy Director

An Academy Director is a member of one of the 21 Academies. Directors oversee the course content goals for the courses in the Academy. An Academy Director may also contribute to lesson plans, test items, and Supplemental Instructional Material for each course. (see SIM)

• Academy Associate Member

Associate Members elect Directors, and contribute to lesson plans, test items, and SIMs. If you would like to be a Director and Associate Member please contact customerservice@eduvisor.org or phone EduVisor at 972-364-9600.

• Competency

Some other words for competency are 'content goal', 'outcome', course 'objective'. A competency is a description of what is to be taught. Competencies should always start with an active verb. In this structure we recommend that a competency on average requires about 3 hours of student learning time. This three hour learning time can consist of classroom time, homework, lab work, or clinical. There are normally about 15 content goals for one semester hour, or about 40-55 content goals for a 3 semester hour course. Thus the formula is: Credit = Time = Content. There is only so much time to teach so much content for so much credit.

• Educational Communication

Planning and creating competencies will help communicate what is to be learned to: students, colleagues, accreditation committees, administrators, education agencies, parents, employers, counselors, and taxpayers. What an educator is to teach, and what a student is to learn can be clearly communicated with carefully crafted competencies.

• Educational Components

Course components are: competencies, prerequisites, interest approaches, instructional approaches (lesson plans)s consisting of presentation, demonstration, and discussion; assignments, test items, and SIMs. Edupedia enables all of these components to be related to content goals.

• Interest Approach

The difference between a good educator and an excellent educator is the ability to get attention, and then maintain attention. An interest approach is something an educator does or says to get or maintain attention. Interest approaches should be related to the content goal. A listing of interest approaches for each content goal will help teachers with suggestion ways to get and maintain interest.

• Performance Objective

A well planned course may have 5 or 10 Performance Objectives. Each Performance Objective normally contains 3-6 Content Goals. These numbers are approximates. Not every content goal needs to be associated with a performance objective. Upfront planning for content goals and performance objectives will save huge amounts of time in creating educational components and efficient teaching, learning, and assessments.

• Signature and Time Stamp

When an educator makes a contribution to a lesson plan or SIM, then that person can click on an icon that is at the top of each 'edit' page. It is the icon that is second from the right side of the display of icons. Click on that icon and you get the name of the person making the contribution or edit, and the time when the edit or contribution is done. When I click that icon then this is what appears: --Wade 18:14, 27 Nov 2004 (CST)

• SIM

SIM is an acronym for Supplemental Instructional Material. Courses in Edupedia are created using competencies. The content goals are used to form an instructional topic by adding an "ing" to the content goal verb. The instructional topic is then used to create a lesson plan for group instruction or a module for individualized (distance learning) instruction. The SIM may contain text, links to internet content, links to uploaded PowerPoint presentations, Winword, Excel, PDF, or other types of files, streamed video, etc. There is no limit to the number of SIMs that might be used. However, most of the SIMs, with direction, will provide information that can be processed by the learner within an expected concentration span of 20-30 minutes. A SIM may be inserted in the interest approach, instructional practice, learning activity, and instructional resource portions of a lesson plan or module. SIMs for each competency may be used in lieu of a text book.