The product life-cycle of online courses and student engagement

ABSTRACT

With increased online course offerings at most higher education institutions, it is important to have a way to determine whether the courses continue to have value to students or outlived their usefulness. Courses are the central means of knowledge delivery for each institution and may be viewed through the lens of the product life-cycle, which is a common way for for-profit corporations to ensure they are aware of when it is time to make adjustments or completely overhaul what they provide to consumers. We leverage this concept to develop a conceptual mode of the life-span and cycle of curricular products; especially, those delivered online, which may have a shorter shelf life than in-classroom courses. To that end, we map a single course that has spanned nearly 20 years and shifted from face-to-face delivery, to a blended mode with learning technologies support, and then into a fully online format. This piece depicts the course life-cycle, which emerged from multi-strategy research analysis of that course. Understanding that online courses have a life-cycle can help department and university managers plan for the investment in the improvement of each as it comes to the end of its useful lifespan. This can ensure high-quality learning and a sustainable portfolio of programs and courses with which students are engaged.     

Organizing for Teacher Agency in Curricular Co-Design

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) approaches to intervention aim for transformative agency, that is, collective actions that expand and bring about new possibilities for activity. In this article, we draw on CHAT as a resource for organizing design research that promotes teachers’ agency in designing new science curriculum materials. We describe how CHAT informed our efforts to structure a collaborative design space in which teachers and other participants sought to develop new curriculum materials intended to help realize a new vision for science education. Specifically, we describe the tools and routines we deployed to support the design process, and we analyze the ways in which teachers took up elements of our design process as well as how they adapted, resisted, and suggested alternative tools and strategies to help develop new curriculum materials. In so doing, we illustrate ways in which CHAT can serve as a guide both for organizing collaborative design processes and for analyzing their efficacy.     

Tilting the playing field: ‘Redshirting’ kindergarten boys in the US and the competition for hegemonic masculinity

This study examines patterns in the kinds of discourses parents use to think about when to start their children in kindergarten in the US. Parents of three- to six-year olds were interviewed to gain an understanding of how parents make the ‘redshirting’ decision and the extent to which parental concern for sons’ achievement of successful masculinity plays into that choice. Focusing on the parents of male children, this analysis reveals parents employ two gender-related discourses: (1) the ‘failing boys’ backlash debate, surrounding the notion that schools are assumed to favour girls and how girls learn, and (2) a discourse involving the importance of hegemonic masculinity in competition with other boys.     

Perceptions of the content and employability value of credentialed teaching certificates

The purpose of this research was to gain a broader understanding of what department heads and doctoral students believe to be the value of credentialed teaching certificates. Using a survey methodology with participants (N= 450), the study focused on the extent to which a credentialed teaching certificate provides a competitive advantage when seeking employment, as well as the content (pedagogical knowledge) that is perceived to be important for such programmes. Using a cross-sectional survey design, results highlight significant differences between doctoral students and department heads regarding the content and value of a credentialed teaching certificate in higher education.     

Working-class women study social science degrees: remembering enablers and detractors

In this article, we report on a feminist memory work project conducted with 11 working-class women in Australia. Participants responded to the question: what helps and hinders working-class women study social science degrees? The women confirmed that to succeed at university, they needed opportunities, resources, support and encouragement. We called these enablers and considered the role of ‘enlightened witnesses’ [Miller, 1997. The essential role of an enlightened witness in society. Retrieved from http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php?page=2]. Hindering the possibility of university success were detractors of many forms including inadequate resources and social conventions that discouraged the women from study. We describe saboteurs as undermining people and forces that the women had to overcome. We found that enlightened witnesses, broadly conceptualised, go some way but not all, to mitigating detractors and saboteurs that continue to hamper fair and meritocratic access to tertiary education.     

Power Drawing

Power Drawing is the education programme of the Campaign for Drawing initiated by the Guild of St George. Primarily a research and development programme, it focuses on drawing in schools and other educational settings and investigates how the use of drawing can help children and young people learn in a variety of subjects. The intention is to develop a range of strategies, methods and techniques to support learning through drawing. This paper explains the ideas underpinning the programme, how it is organised and the research methods used. It describes and reflects on the experience of the first year of the action research, and comments on some of the satisfactions and tensions that have emerged. It outlines how these will influence further development.     

The Power of “Open”

ABSTRACT

In a vision session at the 31st NASIG Annual Conference, Heather Joseph provided an assessment of the Open Access movement addressing how far it has come since its inception, how well it has met its original goals, what has and has not worked well, and what is not happening at all. She talked about the importance of open (in all senses—open access, open education, and open data) as a public good, and shared feedback from a recent strategic review of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the Open Access movement. Joseph also explored the implications of using open as an enabling strategy for researchers, scholarly publishers, policymakers, and the larger academic community, and emphasized the importance of deliberately considering what outcomes open can help each community achieve—rather than thinking about open as an end to itself.     

Message fatigue: Conceptual definition,operationalization, and correlates

Despite growing concern over the public’s fatigue toward inundated health messages, communication research has largely neglected such ramifications of prolonged, real-life campaign exposure. This paper offers an initial conceptual and empirical treatment of message fatigue, an important, but understudied, side effect of campaigns. Specifically, it proposes conceptual and operational definitions of the construct and examines psychometric characteristics of a proposed message fatigue scale. The findings from two studies concerning safe sex (N?=?412) and anti-obesity messages (N?=?396) demonstrated solid support for the scale’s unidimensionality. In support of construct validity, the scale exhibited significant associations with message avoidance, annoyance, information seeking, and desensitization. Moreover, in an experimental setting in Study 2, message fatigue negatively predicted attention and message elaboration, while positively predicting counterargument.     

Records management practices in ecumenical tertiary institutions: the Trinity Theological Seminary in focus

The study aimed at examining the records management practices at the Trinity Theological Seminary in Ghana and was underpinned by the life cycle concept. The researchers drew qualitative inferences from interviews, complementing personal observations, with 25 purposively sampled staff. The study revealed the creation, maintenance and use of records to support administrative and decision-making processes. Problems hampering effective records management included non-existent records management policy, inadequate staff training and erratic power supply. Among the recommendations proposed to overcome these setbacks were: formulating a written policy statement for managing records, providing staff with formal training and installing a standby generator.     

Assessing the Impact of School-Based Marketing Efforts: A Case Study of a Foreign Language Immersion Program in a School-Choice Environment

The marketization of K–12 education has led to an increase in school-based marketing efforts. Relatively little research, however, has examined how public schools market themselves, who is involved in marketing, and how these marketing efforts impact key stakeholders, including school administrators, teachers, students, and parents. We explore these questions in this qualitative study of school-based marketing efforts at South Boulevard,¹Because of the long and public history of desegregation litigation associated with the school and with the school district, we use real place names throughout the paper. Thus, we disclose both the school's name—South Boulevard Foreign Language Academic Immersion Magnet—and the name of the city in which the school is located—Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in order to maintain the authenticity of the case and the findings. a foreign language immersion magnet elementary school in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. Analysis of data from participant observation and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders reveals that administrators, teachers, parents, and students actively participated in marketing and recruiting, and that these efforts were associated with a number of implicit and explicit costs. Introducing two concepts from the business literature—business-level strategy and brand communities—yields a number of observations and policy questions. Finally, the shifting role of parents and administrators in an increasingly market-like school-choice environment is discussed.