Acknowledgements

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IDEAL Consortium member state leaders and the teachers they support work tirelessly to provide innovative learning opportunities for adult foundational education learners and have continuously shared their expertise; they are frequently presenters at national adult education conferences and other professional development events addressing topics like the use of open and free education resources, using GenAI to plan instruction, or implementing digital navigation programs. As such, the collaboration fostered through IDEAL has proven a rich incubator for exploring ideas, sharing useful strategies, and collectively solving problems of policy and practice that has spilled out to positively shape innovative adult distance and digital education programming across the United States. This edition acknowledges that generosity, a defining element of the IDEAL Consortium. As conveners of the IDEAL Consortium and providers of technical assistance to adult education programs across the country, we at World Education have been in a unique position to spur, document, and amplify innovation. We have updated this edition to honor and share the IDEAL Consortium’s evolving work in distance and digital education.  

Our History

IDEAL Consortium was founded as Project IDEAL in 2002 by Dr. Jere Johnston as a consortium of states interested in developing distance education programs. Under Dr. Johnston’s leadership, collaborative research and program development facilitated by Project IDEAL demonstrated that distance education was a viable option to meet the needs of adults for whom classroom options were either not available or not a good fit. As a voice for member states, IDEAL has shaped distance education policy at the state and national levels and has provided professional development expertise for practitioners nationwide since those early years.

Since 2015, World Education has convened what we now call the IDEAL Consortium. Initially individually led by Dr. Jen Vanek, our current leadership is shared among key staff at World Education: Dr. Vanek, Jamie Harris, Destiny Simpson from Tuscarora Intermediate Unit 11/Open Doors Learning and Design, and a team of nationally-recognized edtech adult education leaders, including Rachel Riggs and Jeffrey Goumas. We engage in this work mindful of the foundation on which it rests—the collaborative leadership and expertise of Dr. Jere Johnston and the early members of Project IDEAL. Under Dr. Johnston’s stewardship, the Handbook evolved through several editions, each time incorporating the lessons learned since the previous publication.

After the transition of the IDEAL Consortium to World Education, the fifth edition, published in 2015, added substantial updates based on experiences in the field since 2008, particularly the expansion of blended learning programs and program changes required by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). The sixth edition (2018) provided key updates gathered over two years of watching the Handbook in use. The seventh edition (2020) included updates deemed necessary after practitioners across the U.S. were faced with rapid scaling of distance education during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The eighth edition published in 2022 shared the lessons learned as the field moved from the emergency transition in 2020 to remote instruction to more sustainable distance education programming. The ninth edition published in 2024 introduced a new approach. It was the first edition retitled the  IDEAL Distance and Digital Education Handbook, reflecting the need to move beyond the previous understanding reflected in the  title used for the fifth through eighth editions, The Distance Education and Blended Learning Handbook. The range of instructional modalities in place in IDEAL member states had stretched to include live remote instruction, hybrid-flexible (HyFlex) options, and seamlessly integrating digital technologies into instruction. For this tenth edition we have retained the new title, included resource and strategy updates, and streamlined the content, particularly in Chapter 5 on instruction. 

We hope this new edition inspires growth for the IDEAL Consortium membership, which enriches our community of practice by bringing new ideas and collaboration. Our shared goal is to collaborate in support of providing quality distance and digital education to adult learners. For information about IDEAL Consortium, visit our information site: https://ideal.worlded.org.

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