Reflecting on the EFA Global Monitoring Report's framework for understanding quality education: A teacher's perspective in Eritrea

This paper considers issues concerning the quality of education in Eritrea using the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report's (GMR) framework for quality education. Drawing on 2 years school-based professional experience in the country, the multiple factors affecting quality in schooling are discussed. The applicability of the GMR framework is then assessed. Given the recent militarisation of the Eritrean school system, it finds the framework seriously lacking, by failing to enable a critique of some of the issues that arguably go to the heart of the quality of education in the country.     

结论及未来发展方向

(一)增强职业教育与培训吸引力的政策和措施 职业教育与培训对个人的吸引力以雇佣机会和收入及使他们获得这些效益的能力和职业技能为基础.当职业教育与培训能够为企业提供满足他们需要的技能型劳动力时,职业教育与培训也会受到企业的认可.     

The challenges of online nursing education

To meet the current critical need for qualified nurses, many colleges have initiated online programs, primarily aimed towards registered nurse (RN) to BS students. Despite the growing number of online nursing programs, there is little research on instructor views of online learning. This study used interviews to investigate nursing instructor experiences in online learning. Results revealed instructor concerns with identifying the most effective assessment methods to judge students' ability to apply their lessons in real-world settings. Online nursing exhibits unique challenges, such as providing nursing students with online authentic learning experiences that relate to real-world nursing situations, which comprise both high-stake medical and interpersonal elements. Results also indicated that providing support and ensuring that the faculty have sufficient time to develop effective courses, with adequate assessment for the students, is necessary to ensure the quality of online nursing education.     

Swapping documents and terms

Experiments were conducted to explore the impact of combining various components of eight leading information retrieval systems. Each system demonstrated improved effectiveness through the use of blind feedback, also known as pseudo-relevance feedback, a form of query expansion. Blind feedback uses the results of a preliminary retrieval step to augment the efficacy of a secondary retrieval step. The hybrid combination of primary and secondary retrieval steps from different systems in a number of cases yielded better effectiveness than either of the constituent systems alone. This positive combining effect was observed when entire documents were passed between the two retrieval steps, but not when only the expansion terms were passed. Several combinations of primary and secondary retrieval steps were fused using the CombMNZ algorithm; all yielded significant effectiveness improvement over the individual systems, with the best yielding an improvement of 13% (p = 10⁻⁶) over the best individual system and an improvement of 4% (p = 10⁻⁵) over a simple fusion of the eight systems.     

Comparability of postgraduate academic qualifications: Some issues, challenges and experiences

In the United Kingdom the topic of the comparability of academicqualifications features prominently on the agenda in higher education. The papersummarises the debate and highlights key issues. It offers specific reflections on theexperience of one university as it seeks to address the topic of postgraduate qualifications,disentangle the many strands of a complex and multi-faceted set of questions and furtherstrengthen internal quality processes in order to meet the growing demands by external bodiesand interest groups.     

A Theory of Practice: Hermeneutical Understanding

Arguments about learning commonly toss the buck back and forth between theory and practice, the pure and applied, the objective and subjective. Most such arguments have tried to find a reliable technical method to explain how we learn. Hermeneutics, with its roots both in sixteenth century theory of linguistic interpretation and modem phenomenological approaches to meaning, denies the claims of method ‐ rationalist or empiricist. It proposes instead to clarify the conditions in which practical understanding can take place. Unlike other approaches to learning, hermeneutics makes human language the core. It is in language that what I call in this paper the four major quadrants of understanding are realised. First, understanding is structured historically in the traditions, prejudices and institutional practices that come down to us. Secondly, understanding depends upon trying to find the unity in all the conditions that pertain to learning, in reconciling the whole with its parts. Third, hermeneutics reconceptualises the nature of practical application to emphasise the constitutive part played by individuals in modifying what is learned, such that to understand is to change as a person. Finally, understanding arises not from a solipsistic encounter between learner and material; it takes the form of a dialogue between a student and all those “others” who constitute the world of learning. In sum, both “cognitive” and “student‐centred” approaches to learning are transcended and fused in a wider horizon of understanding.