Governing education through data: Scotland,England and the European education policy space

This paper draws on interview data from national policy makers in England, Scotland and the European Commission to illustrate differences in the referencing of ‘Europe’ in education policy‐making in England and Scotland in order to highlight the emergent complexity of post‐devolution policy‐making in education through a focus on relations and interactions with Europe, as expressed in the negotiation and development of performance data systems. We suggest that policy‐makers in England reference global influences, rather than Europe, while policy‐makers in Scotland reference Europe in order to project a new positioning of Scotland in closer alignment with Europe. Europeanisation in education thus produces differing policy responses from closely aligned, indeed, in the case of England and Scotland, contiguous policy spaces. Thus the paper seeks to contribute to the literature on ‘travelling’ education policy and its ‘local’ mediation and to connect the development of devolution and the changing policy space of education in Europe.     

Implementing government policy on ICT in education: Lessons learnt

This paper examines lessons learnt from national research and evaluation studies of ICT in schools in the UK. From research on policy implementation and reform in education, it is well known that change is either very slow or tends to fail. Implementation is a complex procedure, not a direct translation from government policy to practice. Alongside documentary analysis of national evaluation reports, the analysis provides a framework for understanding the implementation process, which exemplifies the structural procedures involved. Government policy has to be filtered through macro, meso and micro levels, as policy is mediated through national agencies (macro), regional agencies (meso) down to individual schools and teachers at the micro level. The analysis identified five key areas that were problematic regarding government policy implementation. These related to management, funding, technology procurement, ICT training and impact on pedagogy. Specifically these were (1) the multi-agency nature of the initiatives in the UK and their leadership; (2) funding disparities that emerged and (3) how these impacted on differential technology resourcing and procurement between schools; (4) the UK’s national ICT training programme for serving teachers; and (5) the impact on pedagogy, of which the latter to date, has been more limited than politicians had hoped. The analysis indicates that policy aims can be achieved if an awareness of the complexity of the implementation process is maintained. This necessitates an understanding of the fact that it is a fluid, non-linear, reiterative process in which key factors are dynamically inter-related: namely, ICT needs to be implemented on multiple fronts, both materially in terms of an ICT infrastructure and culturally in terms of generating an ethos that values ICT for classroom practice. Attending to the multidimensionality of ICT policy implementation aids the management of the change process at the local level of the school. This allows for an understanding of the ways in which teachers interpret policy and engage in implementation of ICT at the local level.     

Active Learning in Engineering Education: a (re)introduction

ABSTRACT

The informal network ‘Active Learning in Engineering Education’ (ALE) has been promoting Active Learning since 2001. ALE creates opportunity for practitioners and researchers of engineering education to collaboratively learn how to foster learning of engineering students. The activities in ALE are centred on the vision that learners construct their knowledge based on meaningful activities and knowledge. In 2014, the steering committee of the ALE network reinforced the need to discuss the meaning of Active Learning and that was the base for this proposal for a special issue. More than 40 submissions were reviewed by the European Journal of Engineering Education community and this theme issue ended up with eight contributions, which are different both in their research and Active Learning approaches. These different Active Learning approaches are aligned with the different approaches that can be increasingly found in indexed journals.     

Digital divide in the utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in counsellor education in Nigerian Universities

Abstract

This study investigated digital divide in the utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in counsellor education in Nigerian universities. It had two research questions and two hypotheses tested at .05 level of significance. It adopted a survey design and used ICT Utilization Questionnaire (IUQ) in gathering data from the entire population of 142 counsellor-educators and trainee-counsellors in the five universities in the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria who offered Guidance and Counselling as a course of study at the Master's degree level in the 2007/2008 session. This instrument was validated by five experts, and its reliability was established to be 0.9. A direct delivery technique was adopted for data collection. Data was analyzed using mean, standard deviation and t-test. Findings show that there is no digital divide based on gender but there is digital divide based on status of the population as counsellor educator or trainee-counsellors. Recommendations were made to different stakeholders on bridging this gap.     

The (absent) politics of neo-liberal education policy

Despite its ideological saturation, recent neo-liberal education policy has been deeply depoliticising in the sense of reducing properly political concerns to matters of technical efficiency. This depoliticisation is reflected in the hegemony of a managerial discourse and the decontestation of terms like ‘quality’ and ‘effectiveness’, as well as in the apparent consensus around the necessity of particular practices, such as the adoption of ‘standards’ and the implementation of high-stakes testing regimes. The reduction of the political to the technical is not only anti-political but also anti-democratic, with violence often unrecognised behind appeals to consensus, commonsense and ‘rationality’. This study draws on the work of political theorists like Mouffe and Rancière to critique the depoliticisation reflected in recent Australian federal government recent education policy, particularly its notion of an ‘education revolution’ that pre-empts politics through a utopian harmonisation of difference and a reduction of the political to the merely technical and instrumental. This article concludes with some potential starting points for crossing, or traversing, fantasies in education which, along with a recognition of the inescapability of social and political antagonisms, could serve as a basis for a renewed emphasis on the importance of the political in education policy.     

Teacher intention to transfer ICT training when integrating digital technologies in education: The teacher transfer of ICT training model (TeTra-ICT)

The aim of this study is to propose a new structural model for how teachers transfer their ICT training (TeTra-ICT), shedding light on the factors that tend to affect their intention to integrate digital technologies in educational practices as well as train their colleagues. The proposed model exploits training programme design characteristics and ICT-related individual factors. A total of 117 new ICT instructors for primary and secondary education teachers in Greece were evaluated. The instructors participated in a national Teacher Training Programme on applying ICT in education. Results indicate significant effects of individual (ICT-related self-efficacy in teaching) and programme design characteristics (platform's ease of use, support, content, and resources) on the teachers' final motivation and intention to transfer their ICT knowledge and skills. The model also reveals significant correlations between individual and training characteristics, the teachers' post-training self-efficacy for transferring skills and their perception of the usefulness of the training programme. The examined constructs explain 86% of the variance in teacher intentions to transfer their ICT knowledge and skills, and 72% of their perception of the usefulness of the training programme. Interestingly, while there were no gender differences in individual ICT-related characteristics, women expressed significantly higher values than men in their perception of the usefulness of training, self-efficacy, motivation, and intention to transfer.     

Reconsidering regionalisation in global higher education: student mobility spaces of the European Higher Education Area

This paper examines international student mobility between member states of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), a group of 47 countries that committed to reforming their higher education systems to improve the comparability and compatibility of degrees. While increased student mobility is a key goal in its official documents, little research has empirically investigated student mobility patterns in respect to the EHEA. The analysis employs multivariate techniques to identify trends in student mobility between 1999 and 2009, using a spatial approach to visualise the relationships between member states as constituted through student mobility flows. Results show that within the analysis timeframe student flows in the EHEA became more even in their distribution, but that in terms of the relationships between states, the EHEA became more centralised and segmented, meaning that key actors mediated exchanges between peripheral states and the region was more easily divided into self-contained clusters. These trends indicate a need to critically reconsider the nature of the EHEA and its role in the globalisation of higher education.     

Online Digital Media: The Uptake of YouTube-based Digital Clinical Education (DCE)

There has been considerable growth in the uptake of digital clinical education (DCE) over the last few years. This growth has coincided with similar growth in social media platforms available to both educators and learners. In this article, we describe a novel, innovative video-based medical education project using YouTube for teaching, training, and learning. We created a series of short ‘System based’ clinical scenario videos and uploaded it to YouTube. Using the analytics function provided by Google and YouTube, end-user data including viewer engagement, uptake, and comments were then analyzed. To date, the channel has garnered more than 5.5 million views over five years between July 2012-July 2017.

With the increase in the use of video-based learning and the popularity of social media platforms, the uptake of DCE is set to increase. YouTube offers a novel approach to streaming medical education for training purposes. A quality assessed, structured and sustainable educational online platform is likely to meet the future requirements of a new generation of learners.     

The Use of ICT in Education: a survey of schools in Europe

The Survey of Schools: ICT in education commissioned in 2011 by the European Commission took place between January 2011 and November 2012, with data collection in autumn 2011. This article presents the main findings of the Survey based on over 190,000 questionnaire answers from students, teachers and head teachers in primary, lower and upper secondary schools randomly sampled. The article details the analytical framework design and the survey methodology implemented. It then presents the main ‘state of the art’ indicators that have been built, concerning ICT infrastructure and access to it, frequency of students' ICT based activities during lessons, level of teachers' and students' confidence in their digital competences, their opinion about using ICT for teaching and learning, and the school strategies to support ICT integration in teaching and learning. The article also presents the main findings of the exploratory part of the analysis, introducing the concepts of digitally supportive school, digitally confident and supportive teacher and digitally confident and supportive student, estimating their respective proportion at EU level on average and by country and investigating whether high percentage of digitally supportive schools include high percentages of digitally confident and positive teachers and students. A few recommendations for policy making at European, national, regional/local and institutional levels conclude the article.     

The policy object: a different perspective on policy enactment in higher education

This paper proposes a new perspective for higher education policy research. It introduces the concept of policy object to designate the discrete preoccupation(s) of a policy text (e.g. a new governance regime, a quality system, or new degrees) and suggests that actor conceptualisations of the policy object intersect with other elements in the policy process to shape enactment and outcomes. First, the policy object concept is described. It is argued that the policy object does not have an objective existence and two concepts are proposed to explain it: ontology and enacted ontology. The former refers to what actors believe the policy object is, a socially-construed context-determined conceptualisation, whereas enacted ontology refers to what the policy object becomes further to enactment under the influence of ontology. Second, the paper presents the findings of a comparative study of master degrees further to the Bologna process in different national and institutional settings to illustrate the policy object approach. This research puts forward arguments to suggest that the policy object could be an important variable to consider in policy research. This somewhat different lens, inviting fine-grained attention to a specific policy object (its ontologies and enacted ontologies), could bring additional insight into policy outcomes.     

Common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR): insights into global policy borrowing in Malaysian higher education

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has emerged as a global policy in language education which has been ‘borrowed’ by nations across the world. This paper presents a critical analysis of Malaysia’s borrowing of the CEFR as part of English language curriculum reform with particular reference to policy motivation and implementation processes as outlined in the English Language Education Roadmap for Malaysia (2015–2025). The analysis draws on Phillips and Ochs’s (2003, “Processes of Policy Borrowing in Education: Some Explanatory and Analytical Devices.” Comparative Education 39 (4): 451–461.) framework for examining educational policy borrowing to highlight challenges as well as prospects of the implementation of the global policy in higher education in Malaysia.     

Education(al) research and education policy making: is conflict inevitable?†

The relationship between research and policy and practice in education is a long‐standing issue in many countries. Focusing on the UK Government, which is responsible for education in England, this paper looks at the criticisms of education research that have been made in recent years by government and related non‐departmental public bodies and stakeholders. It then looks in more detail at specific examples of the use that has—and has not—been made of research in developing policy. But rather than produce a balance sheet of pluses and minuses in policy makers' use of evidence, the paper emphasises the realities of the policy making process and the difficulties in establishing consistently and exclusively evidence‐based policy. At the same time, it argues that researchers should beware of allowing their work to be shaped entirely by the Government's call for research that is directly useful to policy by always prioritising applied or practice‐based approaches. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for BERA to promote all types of education research—regardless of its utility for policy makers—and, as part of this, for the education research community to ensure that appropriate quality criteria are available for all approaches.     

The state of ICT education in China: A literature review

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education has made significant progress in China in the last two decades and this paper provides an overall presentation of its prevalence and usage. In this paper, a literature review has been conducted based on the research in the field of ICT in education. Eleven major issues have been classified and discussed according to their similarities and differences. As an overview and synthetic angle, this paper focuses on how those issues are studied, how they have evolved, and what results have been carried out from the research.