Search results for "higher education"
showing 10 items of 1325 documents
Understanding Social OER Environments—A Quantitative Study on Factors Influencing the Motivation to Share and Collaborate
2014
Social software environments are increasingly used for open education: teachers and learners share and collaborate in these environments. While there are various possibilities for the inclusion of such social functionalities for OER, many organizational, individual and technological challenges can hinder the motivation of teachers to share and collaborate in these environments. Current research cannot explain what barriers teachers face in social OER environments and how those challenges influence their motivation to engage in such environments. An exploratory factor analysis was used in the context of schools and higher education institutions to investigate the possible barriers to engagin…
High school students' perspective to university CS1
2013
This paper presents a qualitative study of a school-university collaborative project where a game-themed CS1 course was offered as-is to high school students. Our specific interest was to explore the students' experiences with the university level course. Our analyses indicate that immediate and regular support was highly important for student performance, as support of this kind could mitigate issues related to students' orientation towards the high workload of the course. Students who showed academic interest were likely to pass, whereas students lacking self-direction or work efficiency were likely to drop out. Both passed and drop-outs found the course to be a good learning experience. …
Semantic Portal as a Tool for Structural Reform of the Ukrainian Educational System
2014
Education is recognized as a fundamental enabler of human development. The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by education (especially in developing countries) contributes to educational system reforms, in addition to the traditional advantages, such as social openness and accessibility. Yet the academic community has not studied sufficiently the challenging context in which ICTs are used as instruments for the reform of inefficient, and sometimes even corrupted, educational systems rather than just as means for smarter classrooms, remote access, or content management. The object of this study is Ukrainian higher education (HE) and its quality assurance (QA) syst…
Accelerating the Americanization of Management Education
2015
The Journal of Management Inquiry astutely predicted in 2004 that the Americanization of business education would not just continue but increase. Ten years later, it is arguable that the acceleration of the Americanization of management education has exceeded all expectations. To theoretically build toward understanding how and why the American business education model has been adopted to different extents, this comparative study builds on the institutional logics perspective, arguing that different institutional logics can potentially explain the various forms and patterns of Americanization and how they are manifested in the world’s business schools.
More educated, more mobile? Evidence from post-secondary education reform
2016
More educated, more mobile? Evidence from post-secondary education reform. Spatial Economic Analysis. This paper examines the causal impact of the level of education on within-country migration. To account for biases resulting from selection into post-secondary education, it uses a large-scale reform within the higher education system that gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics in Finland in the 1990s. This reform created quasi-exogenous variation in the supply of higher education over time and across regions. The results based on multinomial treatment effects models and population register data show that, overall, polytechnic graduates have a significantly highe…
A moral economy of patents: case of Finnish research universities' patent policies
2013
The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of moral economy for higher education studies through a study of Finnish research universities' patent policies. Patent policies not only stimulate the commercialization of research, they also set norms for behavior and aim to clarify how to distribute rights and responsibilities during the commercialization of research results. My main research finding is that even though institutionalized university patenting is a very recent phenomenon in Finland, policies regulating it have significant similarities to the US case. The main conclusion of this paper is that the question of university patent policies should…
Reciprocal commitment in academic careers? : Finnish implications and international trends
2016
This study explores the nature of reciprocal commitment in academic careers. The article is based on a survey conducted in autumn 2013 among fixed-term employees at eight major universities in Finland (N = 810). The analysis is focusing on researchers who have a doctoral degree and who are working on a fixed-term contract at their university (n = 308). According to our study, researchers experience their working conditions are insecure and many of them have considered leaving their universities. Despite the fact that they find their work meaningful their uncertain and poor working conditions are related to their thoughts of leaving the university. In addition in many of the cases leaving th…
The construction of academic identity in the changes of Finnish higher education
2013
This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a p…
University Autonomy, Agenda Setting and the Construction of Agency : the case of the European University Association in the European Higher Education…
2014
This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of ‘autonomy’ as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and Jepperson's heuristic of agentic actors, to show how the practice of knowledge production can shape the European higher education policy. The article offers a contribution to the debate aiming to develop a more critical perspective on the development of the European Higher Education Area, which sees the process as constituted through the activities of, and t…
Agentic perspective on fostering work-related learning
2017
Despite the increased recognition of the role that professional agency plays in work-related learning, little is known about what supports it. Based on current theoretical notions, the first purpose of this paper is to show that professional agency is closely intertwined with work-related learning. The second purpose is to introduce some main principles that promote professional agency and describe three work-related training settings that are aimed at fostering learning by taking into account agentic perspectives. These complementary settings include an identity coaching programme, a leadership coaching programme, and a work conference. Based on the qualitative meta-synthesis, the paper fu…