Bridging the Challenges of Transnational Education and Accreditation

Between 1985 and 1996, the world population of kindergarten through to higher education students grew from 919 million to 1.13 billion. There are at least three typical global higher education student profiles. Distance education - the delivery of education courses from one location to students at another location - is an alternative way to reach many students within these profiles. Distance education has a different set of characteristics from that typical of place-bound education, and transnational education brings yet more features. Regardless of the ways in which education is delivered, its quality assurance and maintenance of standards is of paramount concern among many national and international institutions, organizations and private sector companies, and students. Organizations such as the Global Alliance for Transnational Education (GATE) provide a prototype for achieving such standards.     

Difficulties in Learning and Teaching Programming—Views of Students and Tutors

We have conducted a web-based questionnaire on the various concepts and topics of object-oriented programming that students on introductory courses found most difficult to cope with.A statistical analysis of our results shows that those topics that rely on a clear understanding of pointers and memory-related concepts (such as copy constructors and virtual functions) prove to be the most difficult. In other words, we believe these concepts are only hard because of the student's inability to comprehend what is happening to their program in memory, as they are incapable of creating a clear mental model of its execution.These results would suggest that a clearer approach to teaching these topics would be beneficial to students. We are currently working on a visualization-based approach to address these issues.     

“Orange is the New Black” Comes to New Jersey’s Public Schools: Black Girls and Disproportionate Rates of Out-of-School Suspensions and Expulsions

This paper explores out-of-school suspensions and expulsions among Black females, who have often been ignored in the extant educational research literature. More specifically, the authors explore the question of whether Black females have been overrepresented in out-of-school suspensions and expulsions in New Jersey public schools. Using data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the authors found that Black females in New Jersey have in fact been overrepresented in both, out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. The extent of that overrepresentation of Black females has not only worsened over time but could also be considered graver in New Jersey than in the rest of the United States. The authors additionally contend that these school push-outs increase the likelihood that Black girls will enter the school-to-criminal justice pipeline. After discussing the study findings in detail, the authors provide several recommendations that are designed to help better comprehend and address the various discipline-related issues impacting Black girls in the New Jersey public school system and that could potentially have broader implications for all of the nation’s schools.

     

Timefulness: an Important Conceptualization but Needing a Better Approach

Science & Education -     

Ensuring the academic library's relevance to stakeholders: The role of the Library Director

This paper presents a substantive grounded theory about how the Library Director can ensure the library's relevance to university and external stakeholders in the face of rapid changes in technology and higher education. A constructivist grounded theory research approach involved 14 semi-structured interviews with 12 Library Directors of publicly funded university libraries in Australia and the United States. The substantive theory and the conceptual model presented in this paper suggest that the Library Director responds to the problem of rapid change by enacting the following strategies: aligning strategic vision with the university; continuously reinventing the library; engaging with stakeholders; building an agile and engaged culture; and demonstrating value to the university. The strategies interact with each other in a cyclical pattern. This is an original theory that emphasizes the important role of the Library Director as the agent and model for library strategy and culture. The theory requires library leaders to be strategic thinkers and to be engaged in strategic planning processes that aim for continuous improvements that make the library agile and engaged with stakeholders. The theory also has a significant impact upon the behaviours required for all library staff members.