Search results for "korkeakoulu"

Exploring the Normative Foundation of Journalism Education : Nordic Journalism Educators’ Conceptions of Future Journalism and Professional Qualifica…

2022

This article deals with Nordic journalism educators’ conceptions of journalism by placing the concept of normativity at the center. The values, norms and ideas concerning journalism and journalistic practice have previously been studied by journalists and journalism students around the world and in the Nordics, while the Nordic journalism educators’ conceptions have remained more or less without attention. Nevertheless, journalism educators play a crucial role in defining what journalism is and what it is not, and thus largely affect future practitioners’ ideas of journalism. Using a questionnaire that has been employed in previous studies, journalism educators within the …

Agenda Setting and Policy Development, Higher Education

2018

Agenda setting is one of key concepts in the critical or interpretative approaches in the study of policy development. Developed in response to positivist paradigms, which saw policies as largely technical solutions to objectively existing problems, critical or interpretive analysis emphasises the constructed, contingent, and processual nature of policies, in particular the role of differently positioned actors in bringing specific issues to the fore (Fischer, 2003). In this sense, the use of agenda setting in the research on higher education policy is fundamentally related to the questions of political power and influence, and thus to the relationship between longer-term structural change …

Assessing agency of university students: validation of the AUS Scale

2016

Fostering agency as a core component of professionalism is seen as a critical task of higher education. However, the tools for assessing university students’ agency, and the pedagogical and relational resources needed for its development, are lacking. The present study describes the theoretical foundations and factor structure of the newly developed Agency of University Students (AUS) Scale, which assesses students’ course-specific agency. In the factor analysis, ten factors emerged. Four of these – Interest and motivation, Self-efficacy, Competence beliefs and Participation activity – are seen to represent individual resources of agency. The other four factors – Equal treatment, Teacher su…

Ihmistieteellinen kriisi-diagnoosi

2016

University as a workplace: searching for meaningful work

2018

Work in academia is changing, and research suggests that not all the changes are desirable. Higher education is developing in a direction heavily criticized, especially in relation to the concepts of neoliberal and academic capitalism. In this article, we explore meaningful work in a university context. Our focus lies on individual lecturers’ positive opportunities to make work meaningful and the university a better place to work for both students and faculty. We examine meaningful work as a relational phenomenon: how meaningfulness is constructed through features such as dialogue, expertise, interaction and sharing of ideas. Our empirical findings are based on analysis of qualitative and q…

SQL Education

2020

Structured Query Language (SQL) skills are crucial in software engineering and computer science. However, teaching SQL effectively requires both pedagogical skill and considerable knowledge of the language. Educators and scholars have proposed numerous considerations for the betterment of SQL education, yet these considerations may be too numerous and scattered among different fora for educators to find and internalize, as no systematic mappings or literature reviews regarding SQL education have been conducted. The two main goals of this mapping study are to provide an overview of educational SQL research topics, research types, and publication fora, and to collect and propagate SQL teachi…

Supporting and constraining factors in the development of university teaching experienced by teachers

2017

Higher education calls for reform, but deeper knowledge about the prerequisites for teaching development and pedagogical change is missing. In this study, 51 university teachers’ experiences of supportive or constraining factors in teaching development were investigated in the context of Finland’s multidisciplinary network. The findings reveal that the supportive factors in teaching development arise from the nature of the development itself, i.e. from the teachers’ opportunities to act as active agents in an authentic development process. Furthermore, the circumstances of the development also play essential roles (both constraining and supportive) in teaching development. Such support, at …

Collaborative argumentation through role-play by students on a degree programme in social services

2019

The aim of this study was to investigate the nature of collaborative argumentation by students enrolled in a degree program in social services. Students (n = 29) in a University of Applied Sciences participated in role-play discussions and problem solving on adolescents’ substance abuse. The discussions were conducted either online (15 students) or face-to-face (14 students). The data comprise the students’ asynchronous online and face-to-face discussions, which were analysed by identifying discussion fragments relevant in collaborative argumentation, and by comparing the results of the two groups. The results showed that the face-to-face discussions were more collaborative than the online …

Bullying and social anxiety experiences in university learning situations

2019

This study examines how individuals’ engagement in bullying at school and at university relates to the anxiety they feel in general and in various learning situations in which students interact during their higher education. It was predicted that, of the individuals who have experiences of bullying (in the role of bully, victim, or in a dual role as bully-victim), those who have been subjected to bullying experience more anxiety than do those who have no experience with bullying. A nationally representative sample of Finnish university students (N = 5086) participated in the study by responding to survey questions assessing their experiences of (a) anxiety syndrome, (b) context-specific soc…

On Supervising Master’s Theses in Industry Context

2022

In software engineering, students easily find internships in companies while still studying. To combine their studies and employment, many of them seek to compose their final theses in an industry context, for the benefit of the employer as well as to simplify their context switching between job and studies. This can put the student between a rock and a hard place, as on one hand the employer has certain expectations in terms of working for the company, whereas the supervising professor needs to follow the university guidelines. An additional aspect worth considering is the university as an administrative home for the thesis and owner of the thesis process. In this paper, we study how the d…