Creating a common grammar for European higher education governance

This paper addresses the interaction between European Union policies and national higher education sectors in the countries involved in the TRUE project (England, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland) making the case for European governance. Relevant for this matter is the role of political processes that evolve at European level shaping political discourses and practices, thus creating a common grammar for European higher education governance. By empirically focusing on evaluation and funding policies the paper argues that European governance reflects in how this common grammar is being created and reconfiguring the environment within which European higher education systems and institutions are developing.     

An adaptive controller for nonlinear teleoperators with variable time-delays

In most real-life bilateral teleoperators the available physical parameters are uncertain and the communications exhibit variable time-delays. In order to confront these situations and only assuming that a bound of the time-delays is known, the present work reports an adaptive controller which ensures asymptotic convergence of both position errors and velocities to zero, provided that a sufficient condition on the control gains is met. Compared to previous related works that only treated constant time-delays, the stability analysis does not rely on the cascade interconnection structure of the local and remote nonlinear dynamics and the linear interconnection map. Instead, the paper employs a different Lyapunov candidate function that incorporates a strictly positive term, the local and remote position error. Some simulations, in free space and interacting with a rigid wall, and experiments, using two nonlinear manipulators, illustrate the performance of the proposed control scheme in the presence of uncertain parameters and variable time-delays.     

Factors influencing the pursuit of personal learning goals in MOOCs

MOOCs are promising opportunities for lifelong learning, but as promising as these learning opportunities seem, many learners do not succeed in pursuing their personal learning goals. Barriers to learning are the main reason for not finishing the intended (parts of the) MOOCs. This study addressed the question whether the factors age, gender, educational level, and online learning experience affect barriers faced while learning in MOOCs. The results show that it is challenging to combine work and family life with lifelong (online) learning activities, especially for learners in their early adulthood and mid-life. However, more experience with online learning positively affects individuals’ ability to cope with these challenges. Also, learners with a lower educational level may experience a lack of knowledge or difficulties with the course content. These findings may serve as input to inform potentially vulnerable learners about these issues and support them in successfully achieving their personal learning goals.     

Profiles of learning opportunities of multilingual and monolingual children in kindergarten

Early childhood education serves an increasing number of multilingual children, and teachers are challenged to create high-quality learning opportunities in the classroom for all children. The child’s engagement and interactions with the teacher are important in this respect. The present study therefore examined how multilingualism relates to engagement and teacher-child interactions, taking a person-oriented approach. During one school year, 76 kindergarteners (43 multilingual) from 19 classrooms were observed for behavioral engagement and individual teacher-child interactions. Five engagement profiles were identified that reflect different levels of engagement across classroom settings. Multilingual children were overrepresented in profiles that showed lower engagement in one or more settings. Also, five interaction profiles were identified that showed strong diversity in the interactions of teachers with children in their classroom. Monolingual and multilingual children were equally represented across these profiles. Children in the more beneficial interaction profiles were also often in the moderate-to-high engagement profiles.

     

The Contribution of Ethnobiology to the Construction of a Dialogue Between Ways of Knowing: A Case Study in a Brazilian Public High School

This paper reports results obtained in pedagogical interventions in a Brazilian public high school which aimed at promoting a dialogue between scientific and traditional knowledge in the context of biology teaching. The interventions were based on the use of a didactic material and teaching sequence elaborated on the grounds of school knowledge about botany, as presented in biology textbooks, and interviews with students who were also farmers, so as to gather data about their ethnobiological knowledge. Our goal was to develop and test resources that can offer support for teachers who wish to build a dialogue between different ways of knowing in multicultural settings. Our results indicate that the use of the didactic material and teaching sequence indeed created possibilities for a dialogue between the students’ ethnobiological knowledge and biology school knowledge. We observed some shortcomings in classroom practice, partly reflecting our very choice of subject matter to develop the teaching sequence. But the interventions also revealed important limitations that we regard as representative of problems that may generally make multicultural science teaching a hard goal to achieve. It was clear that important shortcomings were related to teachers’ difficulties to conduct a dialogue between ways of knowing in a science classroom, and, thus, called attention to the importance of introducing a multicultural dimension into teacher education. We also observed that the fact that students did not show much sensitivity towards dealing with cultural diversity was a factor constraining the success of the interventions. These results highlight the importance of proposing and testing teacher education initiatives aiming at preparing them to teach science in a culturally sensitive manner, and also managing classroom tensions and conflicts so as to make it possible an effective dialogue between different ways of knowing in a multicultural setting.     

构建远程开放教育学习支持服务模式的探讨

文章分析了英国开放大学对学习者支持服务的范式和我国部分地区远程开放教育学生对学习支持服务的要求,通过借鉴并结合实际,探讨构建以九项活动和五项要求为主要内容的远程开放教育学习支持服务模式,并对其实施进行了讨论.     

团队型阅读教育服务组织结构的构建与实践

以管理学中的扁平化理论为基础,构建基于"团队"的阅读教育服务组织结构,希望能够用自我指导管理和工作团队代替传统的职能部门管理。通过实行上下互动的管理过程,通过合作、协商和伙伴关系确认共同的目标,减少实施阅读教育对策过程中的种种知识结构屏障,提升高校图书馆阅读教育的服务水平,促进大学生阅读教育的持续发展。     

European Action Plans for Science–Society Relations: Changing Buzzwords,Changing the Agenda

Minerva - This project began with the changes in the names of the European Commission’s action plans for the relationship between science and society. Analysing the main relevant documents in...