Are Students Customers in Finnish Higher Education?

This study examines Finnish higher education students’ perceptions of whether students are customers, based on qualitative interview data. The article contributes to the discussion on students as customers by giving attention to students’ own voices from a country where tuition fees are not generally collected. The data are presented and analysed using a matrix of preference and perception of seeing students as customers. While the data contained student voices insisting that it is not appropriate to talk about customers because money is not involved, different orientations showing either a preference or perception of students as customers were also described. It is concluded that seeing a student as a customer might be a solution to various higher education challenges which are not all related to tuition fees.     

Clapping with two hands: Bringing together local and outside knowledge for innovation in land husbandry in Tanzania and Ethiopia ‐ a comparative case study

Abstract

Promoting rural development in Africa involves learning to clap with two hands, that is to say, creating effective interaction between local knowledge and development initiatives, on the one hand, and the knowledge and initiatives of formal agricultural research and extension, on the other. Farmer innovators ‐men and women farmers who take their own initiative to change local agriculture ‐ are key allies in rural development, as shown by the experience of the ISWC programme in Africa. Focusing on Ethiopia and Tanzania, the authors describe how formal research and extension services are made aware of farmers’ innovative work and are encouraged to document the results, promote their spread, and support further development efforts by farmer innovators. A modified Participatory Technology Development (PTD) approach is thus emerging, which starts not with problem analysis but rather by linking up with local problem‐solving initiatives. While the learning process on this approach continues, dialogue has been initiated with policy‐makers with a view to incorporating the approach into regular government extension, research and training activities.     

Factors Influencing Military Police Officers in Their Decision in Selecting Higher Educational Institutions

The active duty personnel in the United States Armed Forces exceed 1,411,932. When combined with reserve units and auxiliary units, the number of personnel surpasses 2 million. Due to the nature of worldwide urban conflict, a great number of military personnel are subjected to, assigned to, or affiliated with some type of criminal‐justice‐related duty. These urban situations and associated policing‐type experiences have captured the interest of many active duty personnel. Countless military members are currently planning honorable discharge and re‐entry into civilian life and seeking educational degrees as a resource for access into a criminal justice career. Educational benefits for veterans offer an enormous advantage to the military personnel. On 1 August 2009, these benefits, which include tuition, books, and housing, were expanded to veterans with at least 90 days of aggregate service on or after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Little is known about this vast group of potential students and what factors play a role in their selecting a college or university. Based on a survey of over 300 active duty military personnel currently assigned to criminal justice duty, the authors were able to extract some important findings on this subject. The factors obtained include, among others, preferred type of course delivery and the importance of official statements of military support. Based on the evidence collected and analyzed, this research exposed and examined several important findings.     

Tracing discursive processes of shared knowledge construction in a technology-enhanced higher education setting

This study focused on combining both the group- and individual-level analyses in studying a collaborative activity in technology-enhanced interactions in a higher education setting. The aim was to make visible, with empirical examples, the quality of the students' web-based discussions and trace the route for shared understanding. By quantifying various communicative functions, the analysis provided general knowledge on the quality and purpose of the discussion in the group and highlighted the different functional positions each student had within the group. However, only a detailed interpretative analysis of the relationships between specific thematic contents, communicative functions, and the collaborative features of the discussion, in the temporal frame, made it possible to trace and gain a deeper understanding of the true acts of collaboration. It also highlighted the individual participants' different participatory and discursive positions in the different phases of the task. Over the study, it became evident that any attempts to define a collaborative activity from either the group's or individual's perspective would only result in a partial interpretation of the collaborative enterprise.