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 The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty

Author(s): Walter Benn Michaels / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2012

This article presents the problem of politics of di erence realized within the American educational system, with a special emphasis on higher education. This politics is according to the author based on putting in the center of all educational actions the idea of diversity, as well in creating academic institutions. This key idea becomes in the American context a special significance, regarding the fact that the American society is based on ideology that celebrates multiculturalism and diversity as such. This article presents also an important for the contemporary situation in the United States problem of combining cultural and ethnic diversity on the economical category of di erence between various classes. Furthermore, it seems to be more significant in the light of the economic crisis in recent years that affected also American education in the same extent.

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"Bermanov dosje", moje pripombe

Author(s): Janko Pleterski / Language(s): Slovenian / Issue: 1/2001

Če vzamemo v roke spomine akademika profesorja dr. Aleksandra Bajta, vidimo, da opisujejo, vsaj v delu, kjer zadevajo njegovo bivanje v Italiji od jeseni 1943 in v prvih mesecih 1944, pričakovano neobičajne doživljaje. Nakazal jih je namreč že v svoji biografiji univerzitetnega učitelja, objavljeni v letu 1957.2 V primerjavi s tistim, kar je o svojem pohajanju po italijanskih gričih napisal takrat, je veličanje sicer nekoliko skromnejše, toda opisi so vzlic temu zanimivi in lepo berljivi. Ni šlo za neuspešne diverzantske podvige v ta namen posebej zbrane skupine, ampak za veliko manjše ambicije, četudi ne za manj tvegane in manj mučne doživljaje. Mladi Aleksander Bajt takrat iz Ljubljane ni "emigriral" pred Nemci, pač pa zato, ker se je bal, da bi ga v domačih hribih partizani kar umorili, čeprav je bil le manj pomemben član Narodne legije. [...]

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"UNIWERSYTET JEST NAJWAŻNIEJSZY”. Stefana Sawickiego idea katolickiej universitas studiorum

Author(s): Henryk Duda / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2017

The article discusses the publications by Stefan Sawicki (a scholar born in 1927) on the idea of the Catholic university. According to Sawicki, the most important issue in this fi eld is the relation between science and faith (ratio et fides), and the resulting question about the university’s identity, in particular about the marks of a Catholic university. The other issues, such as procedures of giving names to Catholic universities, their research fi elds, the proper size of a Catholic university, and the balance between the university’s openness to ‘others’ and its guarding its identity, stem directly from this crucial issue. While Stefan Sawicki’s writings will not provide a ready-made answer to the question of how a Catholic university should be structured or how it should function at a given time in history, they may inspire a “reflection and debate on what the university of this type should (and can) be like today, in particular in modernday Poland” (Stefan Sawicki, On the Catholic University, Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 2012, 8). Sawicki adds: “It might be commendable not to limit the debate in question to the general formulas of the Catholicity of a university, but rather to point how the Catholicity in question should be implemented in the academic practice” (ibidem). The questions raised by Sawicki pertain to an issue which cannot be disregarded also outside the scope of his work.

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"За" и "против" за развитието на общата търговска политика на Европейския съюз

Author(s): Irena Nikolova / Language(s): Bulgarian / Issue: 1/2018

In recent years, the trade policy of various countries has become an important topic, both for administration and business. The present paper aims at presenting the EU trade policy and some of its advantages and challenges.

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(Nie)zależność doktoranta w kształtowaniu drogi badawczej na podstawie ustawy Prawo o szkolnictwie wyższym i nauce

Author(s): Izabela Florczak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 25/2020

Pursuant to the Act on higher education and science, PhD students are educated at a doctoral school. The PhD student prepares a dissertation under the supervision of a supervisor (sometimes also an auxiliary supervisor) leading his scientific path based on the training program and individual research plan. The research work of the doctoral student remains independent as it was in the previous legal reality. However, the degree of PhD students` impact on the research path is much greater. A PhD student remains part of the institutionalized system, in which he has to perform certain duties and through which he is evaluated for the progress of his research. The PhD students` dependence is also related to non-legal factors – individual personnel relations. The presented text covers the situation of the doctoral student on all the above mentioned criteria creating a coherent picture of his (in)dependence in shaping the research route.

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10 Years of Learning Design at the Open University: Evolution, Findings and Future Direction

Author(s): Gerald Evans / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

Over the past 10 years The Open University has embedded an institutional approach to Learning Design, with use of the approach mandated as part of the curriculum design process.This paper will explore how that approach has developed over time, as practitioners have learnt from and developed the offering, and as requirements on the institution and on curriculum production have changed. This evolution has seen the approach develop into an end-to-end process of design and evaluation and brought to bear the power of learning analytics into curriculum design.The paper will also explore the various internal and external research outputs, synthesising these into some key lessons that have been learnt over the past ten years. Finally, the paper will look ahead, to see how the next ten years might look and how the role of Learning Design may adapt over this time.

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100 MOOC Project for SMES: What do They Need

Author(s): Sezin Esfer,Kursat Cagiltay,Nergis Gurel,Rafet Cevik / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

This learning needs analysis study has been conducted within the scope of a European Union funded Project that proposes to build up a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) portal to support the adaptability of employees and employers to new social and economic structures and increase adaptability of them via ICT tools in Turkey. In the scope of this Project which is called as Bilgeİş, it was planned to create 100 MOOCs (mainly ICT usage related) and a survey was conducted for specifying the training needs in determined sectors. The data were obtained from 585 employers/executives and 1030 employees of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). It is found that learning needs of the target group have occurred generally in equipment and tools used at the workplace, Office programs, accounting software etc. Also, a list has been created according to survey results and obtained six categories. Examining the current station of SMEs helped to shape the planning of MOOCs’ design and development process. The results of the current study are not only important for Bilgeİş MOOCs, but also for MOOC developers, ICT trainers, experts, policy makers, etc. can benefit from them.

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A Collaboration & Learning Environment to Enable to be a University Leader in Education Innovation

Author(s): Willem Van Valkenburg / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

Delft University of Technology was founded 176 year ago as an engineering school. It is a traditional brick-and-mortar university in engineering, science and design with 24,000 students on campus.In 2014 the executive board embraced the online learning development and started the innovation programme on open and online education (TU Delft, 2014). The objectives of the programme are to educate the world and enhance the quality of education (for both the online and campus programmes).This new programme combined with the changing needs in campus education required a new learning management system (LMS) that is both flexible and stable in a rapidly changing world.

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A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN THE PERCEPTIONS AND ATTITUDES OF STUDENTS IN TWO HIGH SCHOOLS WITH DIFFERENT STATUS REGARDING THE PHENOMENON OF BULLYING IN SCHOOLS

Author(s): Cosmin Goian / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2020

Bullying is described as a set of aggressive actions, characterized by intent, repetition and an imbalance of forces. These characteristics refer to the fact that the aggressor chooses a weaker victim, who will be aggressively and repeatedly assaulted, usually in school. Wanting to explore this topic locally through the eyes of the students, we conducted a research to identify the differences in perception and attitude of the students from two different high schools (a national college and a technological high school), regarding this phenomenon. The main hypothesis is that tensions and difficulties in the school environment can affect the attitudes of students regarding violence. We applied a questionnaire to 72 students (36 from each high school) from Sighetu Marmatiei. The results show that the students from the technological high school, know more information about bullying, and they consider this phenomenon to be less frequent compared to the students from the national college, and the feeling of being safe at school is greater. Students from both high schools expressed pro-victim attitudes to a greater extent, but the attitude toward the aggressor was more negative in the case of students from the national college and more positive in the other school. We can conclude that if the academic standards of the students are higher, there is more tension is the school atmosphere, which can generate bullying situations and feelings of insecurity at school.

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A Comparative Study of Attitudes towards Entrepreneurship between Polish and British Students

Author(s): Michał Chmielecki,Robert Seliga / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2015

Background Entrepreneurship continues to gain momentum as a significant and relevant field of research. Policy makers in the rush to stimulate entrepreneurship in various countries, often rely on the success stories and prescriptions documented in the entrepreneurship literature in which most studies are set in the United States. Research aims The article present exploratory study addresses the subject of cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards entrepreneurship by focusing attention on two particular types of cultures of entrepreneurship British and Polish. Method The quantitative research (survey) was conducted in May 2014 among 153 Polish and 94 British graduate and postgraduate management students. Key findings The findings have some distinctive implications for government, policy makers and educators through determining the attitudes towards entrepreneurship among students.

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A Comparison of Social Learning Systems: Crochet Alongs and MOOCs

Author(s): Shirley Williams,E.J. Highwood / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2018

Essentially social learning is a system where the learning occurs with and from others. Internet-based technologies have provided environments within which social learning can take place among very large groups covering various topics, ranging from academic to leisure.In general MOOCs are academic-related courses offered by educational institutions, following a model of formal education, however they also take advantage of the concept of social learning, encouraging participants to learn together and from each other.Crochet Alongs (CALs) are non-formal courses offered outside educational institutions. CALs give crocheters the opportunity to learn more about their craft within an Internet-based social learning system, while working independently on their own instantiation of a pattern released at intervals. Participants offer support to each other via social media, sometimes seeking help in overcoming problems and other times just to share success.There is a considerable body of research into the MOOC phenomena, there is no such body of research into CALs, or other Internet-based craft courses. There are a number of similarities between MOOCs and CALs with some CALs attracting thousands of participants to freely available online courses. Contrasting MOOCs and CALs offers educationalists to explore alternatives approaches to social learning.

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A Continuum of Approaches to School Inspections: Cases from Europe

Author(s): Rossitsa Simeonova,Yonka Parvanova,Martin Brown,Gerry McNamara,Sarah Gardezi,Joe O’Hara,Laura Del Castillo Blanco,Zacharoula Kechri,Eleni Beniata / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2020

School inspection systems have undergone a transformation in response to the changing social and economic scenarios across Europe. However, two major approaches can easily be identified that also define the two ends of the continuum of the approaches to school inspection. On one end is a high stake sanctions oriented inspection while on the other end is the low stakes advisory inspection. The elements that contribute to the rigour of school inspection include governance arrangements, statutory powers of the inspectorate including powers of sanction, the forms and frequency of inspection visits, the level of emphasis on school self-evaluation and action planning for improvement; and availability of support services for the schools. The current paper presents four cases from Europe: Bulgaria, Ireland, Greece and Spain (Extremadura) describing how school inspection is organised in these countries as defined in the governing legislation and to which end of the continuum their inspection system is tilted in the light of that case’s performance on the above indicators. Towards the end, this paper makes a comparison of the cases and suggests why the relationship of trust and respect between inspectors and the inspected is stronger in some cases and how developing inspection systems can benefit from analysing the established systems.

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A Digital Learning Ecologies Conceptual Framework in the Microsystem of Online Higher Education

Author(s): Mitchell Peters,Montse Guitert Catasus,Marc Romero Carbonell / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

The field of online and distance learning (ODL) has expanded exponentially in the networked society becoming part of mainstream higher education practices and a catalyst for both reform and educational transformation, ushering in new pedagogical models of open and distance learning through the affordances of networked information and communication technology.The guiding research problem recognizes an urgent need to think more holistically and critically about online learning across a variety of contexts, and deliberately consider the interconnections between institutionalized learning and the informal, incidental and tacit learning that happens in contexts outside of formal environments.

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A direct application of medical corpora to academic writing: A specialized concordance search interface and Moodle-based courseware

Author(s): Shozo Yokoyama,Chizuko Suzuki,Seisuke Yasunami,Naoko Kawakita,Ryo Ohba / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Despite a relatively large number of research papers discussing corpus-based discourse analysis for medicine, few attempts have been made to uncover the rhetorical distinctiveness of subdisciplines such as Genome Bio-Science, Nursing, Public Health, and Clinical Surgery. The aim of this study is to apply the frequencies of verbs (including modal verbs) found in medical research articles (RAs) among these four subdisciplines to materials development by incorporating a specialized concordance search interface and Moodle-based courseware for medical students.

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A Learning Analytics Methodology for Detecting Sentiment in Student Fora: A Case Study in Distance Education

Author(s): Vasileios Kagklis,Anthi Karatrantou,Maria Tantoula,Chris T. Panagiotakopoulos,Vassilios S. Verykios / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2015

Online fora have become not only one of the most popular communication tools in e-learning environments, but also one of the key factors of the learning process, especially in distance learning, as they can provide to the students involved, motivation for collaboration in order to achieve a common goal. The purpose of this study is to analyse data related to the participation of postgraduate students in the online forum of their course at the Hellenic Open University. The content of the messages posted is analysed by using text mining techniques, while the network through which the students interact is processed through social network analysis techniques. Furthermore, sentiment analysis and opinion mining is applied on the same dataset. Our aim is to study students’ attitude towards the course and its features, as well as to model their sentiment behaviour over time, and finally to detect if and how this affected their overall performance. The combined knowledge attained from the aforementioned techniques can provide tutors with practical and valuable information for the structure and the content of the students’ exchanged messages, the patterns of interaction among them, the trend of sentiment polarity during the course, so as to improve the educational process.

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A Lost Lady: A Narrative of Manifest Destiny and Neocolonialism

Author(s): Ammar Aqeeli / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2020

The greatly examined story of A Lost Lady usually depicts Mrs. Forrester’s success in meeting and adapting to the challenges of a changing world, a world characterized by materialism and self-fulfilment. However, the overlooked story, one far more disturbing than the privileged story in the text, is the narrative of oppressed groups of people of other races and the lower class. Drawing on some aspects of postcolonial theory, this paper explores Willa Cather’s own reactions to real changes in her society, to the waning power of imperialism, and of her nostalgic longing for the western prairies of her youth, without showing any sympathy for the dispossessed Native Americans and other oppressed races. It will also disclose the unmistakable colonial overtones, which remarkably resonate with the common discourse of “Manifest Destiny” during the time period of American expansion to the Wild West.

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A Matter of Distance – Stepping into the ‘Dance’ of Practice through Eportfolios

Author(s): Susan Sherringham / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

The overarching project under consideration in this paper is that of supporting international students’ transition into university culture in Australia through the development of knowledge, skills and dispositions. In this context the concept of distance shifts from distance learning to distance load where students face many levels of distance in their transition to university. This paper suggests that a reconceptualisation of ePortfolios through practice theory may prove useful in addressing distance load. An ePortfolio reconceptualised as rehearsal and performance space, a supportive environment where students can metaphorically step in and out of the dance of learning, offers a conceptual frame for a personal journey, an apprenticeship into new ways of knowing, doing, and being, and an acculturation into practices and learning communities. It is proposed that by engaging with curriculum through an ePortfolio, informed by social practice theory, students not only develop skills and knowledge, but also more evolved dispositions that begin to embody technology as a valued and integral part of learning in a way that can be carried forward into their social and civic life. In conceiving of educational practice through the lens of practice theory, it is posited that the skills and knowledge (required) to actively engage in a society (characterized by digital technology) are learned and embodied through practices.

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A Metacognitive MOOC Framework

Author(s): Jennifer Roberts,Ignatius G.P Gous / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

MOOC completion rates are well documented as being very low, in most cases, between 5% to 15% (Greene, Oswald, & Pomerantz, 2015; Jordan, 2014). Many reasons have been suggested for the low completion rate. This paper investigates the thesis that one of the predictors of the low completion rates, is that students are not satisfied with the overall experience (structure, content, delivery, etc.) of the MOOC. According to the SERVQUAL measurement scale of satisfaction, service quality can be defined as the difference between expectations and actual experiences. The argument put forward in this paper is that service quality will be enhanced if students’ expectation of the MOOC is well understood and that they are properly prepared for what to expect when undertaking the MOOC. This paper follows from an already accepted research paper featuring an auto ethnographic journey of undertaking a MOOC. The author proposed a metacognitive MOOC framework, from a learner’s perspective, based on her MOOC journey. In this paper, this metacognitive MOOC framework is examined in terms of reflective as well as practical components, to assist prospective MOOC students to be prepared for the experience and enhance their satisfaction with their MOOC.

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A Model of Online Collaborative Project-Based Learning (OCPBL) within a Digital Competence Course in Higher Education

Author(s): Teresa Romeu,Montse Guitert Catasus,Marc Romero Carbonell / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

Digital technologies are essential drivers of innovation, growth and job creation in a globaleconomy (European Commission, 2014), there is a Gap between the social need to be updatedin the use of these technologies and the training citizens receive to use them in a critical,collaborative and creative way. In that sense, digital competence is becoming a must foremployability and active citizenship.

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A MOOC Taxonomy Based on Classification Schemes of MOOCs

Author(s): Tharindu R. Liyanagunawardena,Karsten Lundqvist,Steven Warburton,Richard Mitchell,Steven Warburton,Shirley A. Williams / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

In recent years there has been a significant growth in the number of online courses known as MOOCs available via online providers such as edX and Coursera. The result has been a marked reduction in the clarity around the different course offerings and this has created a need to reconsider the classification schemes for MOOCs to help inform potential participants. Many classifications have been proposed which cover the needs of academics and providers but may not be suitable for learners choosing a course. In this paper, the various classifications used by MOOC providers and aggregator services to categorise MOOCs in presenting information to prospective learners are gathered and analysed. As a result, 13 different categories are identified, which cover information provided to learners before entering a course. These categories are then compared and combined with classifications from the literature to create a taxonomy centred round eight terms: Massive (e.g. enrolments), Open (e.g. pre-requisites), Online (e.g. Timings), Assessment, Pedagogy (e.g. instructor-led), Quality (e.g. reviews), Delivery (e.g. educators), Subject (e.g. Syllabus). Thus, producing a taxonomy capable of categorising MOOCs from a wider perspective.

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