Project IDEAL (Improving Distance Education for Adult Learners) is a consortium of 14 states exploring the potential of distance education to increase access of under-educated adults to educational resources. These adults are in the educational categories of ABE (Adult Basic Education), ASE (Adult Secondary Education) and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). The Project IDEAL Support Center at ISR provides technical assistance to these states, providing assistance in the design and implementation of educational experiments and on research to evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts. States that join the consortium are asked to share in the costs of the Support Center. This proposal describes the total cost of the Support Center for 2011-2012; separate proposals are being prepared for each of the member states for their share of these costs.

Each state’s contribution pays a portion of the cost for (1) technical assistance with the delivery of teacher training and professional development within their state, (2) A collection of research instruments that the state can use to assess their efforts, (3) assistance with collecting and organizing the data, and (4) a week-long workshop held in Ann Arbor each August where personnel from the state receives assistance analyzing and reporting their data.

Taken collectively, data from the participating states will answer important research questions regarding the type of adult that can make educational progress studying at a distance, including the motivational constructs associated with success. The research will also answers questions about the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of online professional development designed to support distance teachers. The Project IDEAL research program will contribute to the federal government’s goal of identifying evidence-based best practices in education.

Overhead for each state’s portion is set at 8% by Federal restrictions associated with the source of their funds.