IDEAL Resources

Beyond defining the skills needed to pursue personal, educational, and career goals in an increasingly digital world, BRIDGES offers the tools and resources needed for learners and training providers to build these skills. Use this tool to identify digital skills goals for learners, find learning resources, and build strategies to help learners build digital readiness.

The Digital Skills Library is an open repository of free learning resources designed to help all adult learners develop the digital skills needed to achieve their personal, civic, educational, and career goals. All resources within this library have been curated by educators to align to the skills framework within the BRIDGES Toolkit.

The 9th Edition of the IDEAL Distance and Digital Education Handbook provides guidance on setting up distance and digital education opportunities in adult foundational education programs. The guidance provided and reflection required in each chapter support the development of practical plans for distance and digital education including pure distance, hybrid, blended, HyFlex, and remote live instruction implementation.

This Guide for Design and Implementation of Hybrid–Flexible Models in Adult Education is intended to help adult education practitioners (teachers, staff, and administrators) and professional development leaders to initiate or improve their flexible multimodal instruction or courses. The guide is based on Dr. Brian J. Beatty’s seminal work with Hybrid–Flexible (HyFlex) models in higher education and is informed by the practice of innovative adult educators.

IDEAL's monthly EdTech Strategy Sessions highlight innovations in edtech and digital opportunity. Join us on the second Friday of every month from September through May to hear practical strategies and innovative approaches to the use of educational technology and the implementation of digital opportunity in education. Each EdTech Strategy session includes: 

• two lightning talks 

• a breakout room for small group discussion 

Missed a live EdTech Strategy Session? View lightning talks from thought leaders, technical experts, policymakers, practitioners, among others on all things educational technology and digital opportunity. All recorded lightning talks are part of the EdTech Center @ World Education's ongoing EdTech Strategy Sessions, which feature two speakers each month.

This YouTube playlist features adult educators across the country showing key strategies and technologies they employ in their distance and digital instruction. 

This YouTube playlist features adult educators across the country showing key strategies and technologies they employ in their HyFlex instruction. 

This tool is designed to observe synchronous remote instruction. The tool is not meant to be used for evaluation purposes. Rather, it’s a resource to:

• Describe what good remote instruction for adult basic education learners looks like.

• Self-assess remote instruction and reflect on current practices.

• Identify professional development needs.

• Identify areas for program improvement.

This tool was developed for adult basic education programs to use when observing synchronous remote instruction. Programs can adapt this tool to meet the needs of the class structure and program demands.

This checklist can be used by agencies developing a new distance education program or those looking to refine an existing distance education program. It doesn’t follow the order learners typically participate in the program (recruitment, orientation, instruction), rather, it starts with a focus on the learners and their goals. Then staff can plan instruction based on the target audience and develop orientation and recruitment strategies once the specifics of the skills and technology needed to succeed in the instruction are more clearly known.