Open and distance learning (ODL) has played an important role in initial teacher education and training since the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)/UNESCO Institute of Education was set up in the 1960s. Early programmes addressed crisis situations by, for example, providing qualified teachers for Palestinian refugee children. The first decade of the 21st century has seen ODL emerge...

Introduction Teacher education finds itself in a critical stage. The pressure towards more school-based programs which is visible in many countries is a sign that not only teachers, but also parents and politicians, are often dissatisfied with the traditional approaches in teacher education In some countries a major part of preservice teacher education has now become the responsibility of the s...

The accumulated economic analysis of education suggests that current provision of schooling is very inefficient. Commonly purchased inputs to schools – class size, teacher experience, and teacher education – bear little systematic relationship to student outcomes, implying that conventional input policies are unlikely to improve achievement. At the same time, differences in teacher quality have...

Background: Quality of education plays a key role in the development of education. Having this perspective in mind the researchers explored the quality of ESP courses from ESP instructors point of views and investigated the role of quality of education of ESP courses in information-seeking behavior of the students. They also probed the possible relationship between EFL instructors reflective pr...

For decades, there has been a shortage of language teachers in the US and other parts of the world. While teacher retirements and attrition certainly help explain the shortage, teachers’ sense of efficacy in teaching languages also plays a role, especially among novice instructors (Swanson, 2010a). The present quantitative study focuses on measuring teacher education candidates’ sense of effica...

This paper explores critically the practice of teacher mentoring in Shanghai schools. It begins with a review of the literature on teacher mentoring, which is followed by an introduction to education and teacher mentoring in the schools. The next section critiques teacher mentoring in Shanghai and we highlight three key characteristics and strengths of the practice of teacher mentoring that ens...

The purposes of this study are to investigate the attitudes and perceptions of teachers toward the adoption of and intention to use Smart Education, to examine empirically the relationship between intention to use Smart Education and the consequential effect factors, and to obtain measures for revitalizing Smart Education. In order to accomplish all these, we suggested an expanded model based o...