Quality Indicators of Online Programs

The continued growth of online programs in higher education has resulted in concerns about how institutions monitor the quality of their online programs. These concerns indicate a need for a process by which online programs may be evaluated and compared. They provided the impetus for this study, the goals of which were to identify quality indicators specific to community college online programs and to determine stakeholders' perceived importance of those indicators.

Categories of indicators were identified through a literature review, and these items were used to guide the development of a Delphi study to identify potential indicators. The results of the Delphi study were then used to create a three-part Stakeholder Survey designed to collect input on perceived levels of importance for each potential indicator using the magnitude estimation technique. The Stakeholder Survey was also used to validate the results of the Delphi. To refine the results of the Delphi study and Stakeholder Survey, a final survey was distributed to a group of distance learning experts, identified through their scholarly research and professional activity. The participants were asked to review the earlier results and classify each item as a factor, indicator, or other according to definitions provided.

The three research stages produced a set of potential data sources that a community college may want to pursue when assessing the effectiveness of its online programs and services. Each of the potential sources of data will be reviewed with a goal towards identifying specific indicators that may be used in developing future instruments.     

The Use of Student Consulting Projects as an Active Learning Pedagogy: A Case Study in a Production/Operations Management Course

Active learning has attracted considerable attention in higher education in response to concerns about how and what students are learning. There are many different forms of active learning, yet most of them are classroom based. We propose an alternative to active learning in the classroom through active learning outside of the classroom in the form of student consulting projects. While the literature on student consulting has largely focused on projects to assist small business owners, this research demonstrates the potential for using student-consulting projects in the Production/Operations Management course. We use a case study to describe the use of a student-consulting project as an alternative to the other types of active learning described in the Operations Management education literature.     

PYRAMIDS,PRISONS, AND PICTURESQUE HOUSING: A DISCUSSION ON DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Part of what has given higher education its remarkable stability in recent years has been its diversity. From the point of view of policy, there are three kinds of diversity in higher education: systemic, programmatic, and structural. Binary higher education systems, representing a form of systemic diversification, have evolved as a response to the massification of higher education. However, because of a number of factors, the perceived ideal remains the traditional university. The non‐university components of binary systems tend increasingly to resemble universities through processes of academic drift. To prevent these processes which in fact negate many of the intentions of planned diversification, social esteem and prestige must be built into all sectors which will then have an interest in preserving their individual identities.     

价值观教与学的途径

一个可持续发展的知识型社会应以价值观为中心,尊重生命、尊重人的尊严、尊重社会和文化的多样性,将人类的劳动和工作作为自我实现和自我完善的源泉,同时也作为经济和社会发展的动力。教育者转变传统价值观教育模式,需应对四个挑战。奎苏姆宾博士提出了新的整合后的教学方法,即以认知、理解、评价和行动组成的四步教学法。这一方法提供了价值观教学的全面和统一的示范流程。     

On Change and Diversity: The Role of Governmental Policy and Environmental Influences

This article addresses the issue of change in the government‐university relationship. As has become increasingly clear for both analysts of higher education policy and for administrators in higher education institutions, a fundamental shift in the relationship between national governments and higher education institutions is taking place in many western European countries. In some countries, these changes are occurring at greater speed than in others, but the movement to what has been labelled “state supervision” is quite dominant. The first part of the article analyzes the rationale for this change at system level by tracing its historical imperatives; after which it discusses the concept of the supervisory governance model. The second part focuses in particular on one of the key objectives of higher education policy, namely diversity, and addresses the question of the extent to which a supervisory governance strategy can contribute to the attainment of this objective and what doing so implies for the role and function of higher education institutions. By focussing on the specific issue of diversity, the authors intend to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between governments and higher education institutions that is implied in the supervisory model.     

Students' estimates of knowledge gained as measures of the quality of teacher education

One set of measures of the quality of courses for the preparation of science teachers stems from the perceptions exit students have of their knowledge with respect to that teaching. The Discipline Review of Teacher Education in Mathematics and Science surveyed these students late in 1988 on three broad types of knowledge-science content knowledge, curriculum knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge. Some of these findings of the Review are described. In addition, the base for developing items to measure these three types of knowledge is discussed in this paper. The variety in the data that emerged is also presented and the consistency of the findings with other measures of quality is described. Specialisations: science and technology curriculum, environmental education, educational disadvantage. Specialisations: research and evaluation in teacher education, technical and further education and total quality management. Specialisations: research in educational systems.