From “Small Wins” to “Big Wins”: Strategic Principles for the Development of Digital Educational Resources and Integration of ICT across Curricula in Small Developing Countries Lina Markauskaite Faculty of Education & Social Work, The University of Sydney, Australia E-mail: l.markauskaite@edfac.usyd.edu.au Abstract The provision of schools (K-12) with appropriate digital educational resources and the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) across curricula is a complicated issue for ICT policy in almost all countries. This issue is particularly apparent in small linguistic communities and developing states. In 2002-2004, a national strategy and some other policy documents for the development of digital educational resources and integration of ICT across curricula were developed in Lithuania. Their development was based on extensive research and proposed tactical principles and measures were carefully tailored to the peculiarities of this small developing country. This paper discusses the key strategic approaches of Lithuanian policy. It reviews recent progress and speculates about the problems that could inhibit effective resource development and ICT integration in the future. 1. Introduction The provision of schools with appropriate digital educational resources and the integration of ICT across curricula has been a topical issue since the beginning of ICT introduction into K-12 education [1]. During the last three decades, policymaking in this area has made substantial progress. In many developed countries, the focus of ICT policies has shifted away from the development and use of small “drill and practice” programs for teaching specific subject skills to the creation of rich repositories of standardized learning objects and the introduction of various eLearning services [2, 3]. However, the lack of appropriate digital content resources and tools, which can be easily used to achieve educational objectives, remains one of the key themes of national and international ICT policies around the world [2, 4, 5]. National governments address questions related to the development of educational resources and infusion of ICT across curricula in different ways. There have been many “success stories” with a variety of specific issues having been effectively addressed in various countries [3, 4]. However, the success of ICT policies is strongly linked with a myriad of local factors (e.g., socio-economic conditions, population, curricula); and good national strategies quite often fail to succeed in other countries’ backgrounds [5, 6]. The transferability of experience from developed to developing countries and from big to small linguistic communities is particularly difficult because of many differences in the internal and external factors impacting eLearning (e.g., students’ access to ICT, governmental funding for ICT in education, maturity of digital content market, local “know-how”). Therefore, developing countries with small linguistic communities have to adjust policies for the development of digital educational resources and integration of ICT across education to local conditions. The aim of this paper is to provide a concise analysis of the most specific policy issues and strategic principles for the development of digital educational resources and integration of ICT across K-12 school curricula in a small developing country. The analysis is based on the example of Lithuania. General characteristics of this country (e.g., GDP per capita, population) and the situation in the educational sector (e.g., availability of national digital resources, stage of educational reform) are typical of many Central and Eastern European countries as well as some evolving Asia-Pacific states [4, 7]. Therefore, Lithuanian policy approaches might be appropriate for many similar developing nations.