The Staff Conference: A Medium for Staff Development

Solihull's development of delegated budgets began in 1981. The experiences of schools and Centre led to the acceptance by Council in 1987 of a scheme for general implementation. The detailed scheme is included in an Appendix to the article, together with examples of vital financial management systems. In his article, the Director of Education explores the effects of delegation of the budget, and with it, the decision‐making process. The school heads’ role gains the natural extension of facility to implement management decisions, but what of the role of the Centre?     

De la ciudad aislada a la aldea global: El microordenador como catalizador del aprendizaje cooperativo y del intercambio cultural

Hace ya algunos años Cole y Scribner, con una investigación transcultural que se ha hecho clásica, establecían una distinción clave entre la lecto-escritura como código por una parte y los usos concretos que de ella se hace, por otra. Con el ordenador en la educación ha llegado también el momento de hablar quizá menos del aparato en sí y más de los usos psico-educativos que hacemos de él. En este artículo se analizan los usos del ordenador en la escuela y las implicaciones psicopedagógicas de esos usos, y se plantea también la materialización de la profecía McLuhiana de la aldea global y del aula sin muros. Por primera vez el aula puede cubrir todo el globo y conectar telemáticamente a niños de todas las culturas.     

LEARNING COMMUNITIES AND COMMUNITY COLLEGES: A CASE STUDY

Learning communities have been present in community college settings for more than a decade. The literature suggests that they are generally effective for both participating students and faculty. As economic development increasingly demands greater technological sophistication, and community colleges are faced with increasing numbers of developmentally challenged students, learning communities may be one means to effectively resolve this paradox. This article is directed to those faculty and staff who may be considering the initiation of a learning community. It provides a review of literature, and presents a set of issues currently being addressed at one small community college in Louisiana where a learning community is in the design stage.     

Adaptation and evaluation of a learning analytics dashboard to improve academic support at three Latin American universities

Despite the success of academic advising dashboards in several higher educational institutions (HEI), these dashboards are still under-explored in Latin American HEI's. To close this gap, three different Latin American universities adapted an existing advising dashboard, originally deployed at the KU Leuven to their own context. In all three cases, the context was the main ruling factor to these adaptations. In this paper, we describe these adaptions using a framework that focuses on four different elements of the context: Objectives, Stakeholders, Key moment and Interactions. Evaluation of the adapted dashboards in the three different Latin American universities is conducted through pilots. This evaluation shows the value of the dashboard approach in different contexts in terms of satisfaction, usefulness and impact in academic decision-making and advising tasks. The main contribution of this paper is the systematic reporting of the adaptations to an academic advising dashboard and showing the value of an academic advising dashboard on academic decision-making and advising tasks.