Higher education in Albania: developing third mission activities

Tertiary Education and Management - The national strategy for higher education of the Albanian government (2008–2013) stated the urgent need for universities to increase their role in the...     

Adequate Policies and Unintended Effects in Spanish Higher Education

Recent developments in Spanish higher education have been very positive.Universities have become autonomous and are more in tune to regionalneeds, their internal structure has become flexible, the whole systemhas become open and accessible, funds have been poured into the system as never before and market forces have started to play a relevant role.Nevertheless, some perverse effects have begun to emerge. We will focus on some of these negative aspects that deserve deeper consideration: the inadequate adaptation to a mass higher education system, and the negativeconsequences of the collegial model for governing universities and ofregionalization.     

Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry–based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

Designing and implementing online or digital learning material is a demanding task for teachers. This is even more the case when this material is used for more engaged forms of learning, such as inquiry learning. In this article, we give an informed account of Go-Lab, an ecosystem that supports teachers in creating Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs). These ILSs are built around STEM–related online laboratories. Within the Go-Lab ecosystem, teachers can combine these online laboratories with multimedia material and learning apps, which are small applications that support learners in their inquiry learning process. The Go-Lab ecosystem offers teachers ready–made structures, such as a standard inquiry cycle, alternative scenarios or complete ILSs that can be used as they are, but it also allows teachers to configure these structures to create personalized ILSs. For this article, we analyzed data on the design process and structure of 2414 ILSs that were (co)created by teachers and that our usage data suggest have been used in classrooms. Our data show that teachers prefer to start their design from empty templates instead of more domain–related elements, that the makeup of the design team (a single teacher, a group of collaborating teachers, or a mix of teachers and project members) influences key design process characteristics such as time spent designing the ILS and number of actions involved, that the characteristics of the resulting ILSs also depend on the type of design team and that ILSs that are openly shared (i.e., published in a public repository) have different characteristics than those that are kept private.