Managing the Process of International Collaboration in Online Course Development: A Case-Example Involving Higher Education Institutions in Ireland,Switzerland, Austria,and the United Kingdom

There has been significant growth recently in online learning and joint programmes of education involving collaborative partnerships between and among higher education institutions in different jurisdictions. Utilising an interdisciplinary team model (Care and Scanlan 2001), we describe in this article the process of collaboration among four European institutions in Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in order to develop and deliver an accredited online course on the management of work-related stress for health and social care workers. This course was also one of the first to pilot a system of equivalency between two European vocational and higher education credit schemes to promote learner mobility and recognition of a new international qualification. Although this process of collaboration occurred within a pan-European context, important lessons may be drawn from this explanation that are of potential interest to the wider international audience.     

ECVET and ECTS credit equivalency in higher education – A bridge too far?

The implementation within Europe of a credit system for vocational education and training known as ECVET is a European Commission priority. The potential for permeability between the ECVET and European Credit Transfer and accumulation System (ECTS) was foreseen in the Recommendation to establish ECVET in 2009, while the Bruges Communique of 2010 called for the promotion of flexible links between vocational and higher education and increased coherence between ECVET and ECTS. To this end a significant number of EU-funded projects were undertaken to explore compatibility between ECVET and ECTS. This article reviews the findings of these projects and reflects on their success in terms of achieving this policy goal. These bridging projects identified several points of compatibility between the two credit systems and produced valuable tools and frameworks to facilitate such permeability. Achieving credit equivalency between ECVET and ECTS does not appear feasible, rather the evidence points to using a learning outcomes-based equivalency framework. However, this article calls into question the sustainability of these project results with regard to the lack of success in translating these findings into practice and the lack of co-ordinated efforts to implement these findings at a national or pan European level.     

Integration of ICT within a project-based learning environment

An enormous challenge is presented to engineering educators by the rapidly changing world of information and communication technologies (ICT). It is essential that students acquire high-quality ICT experience before emerging into the real world of employment. The overall impact of ICT on teaching and learning at the current time, however, is largely through the conversion of conventional lecture notes to static documents, which are made available to students on the web. Project-based learning, by comparison, can provide students with the opportunity to work with emerging technologies and also gain important industrial experience. The first part of this paper presents a summary of the challenges that ICT presents third-level institutions through an examination of the pedagogical issues (and solutions) that arise from a move from traditional lectures to projectbased teaching. This introductory material is followed by the main bulk of the paper, i.e. two case studies. The first is an account of a short project, which involved the evaluation of commercially available undergraduate teaching material provided on CD-ROM. The second case study describes a more substantial project that began life at undergraduate level in collaboration with an indigenous Irish company involved in software development. This project involved the design and development of an online retailing prototype, which was subsequently developed further and launched as a commercial venture.     

Teachers’ views on research as a model of CPD: implications for policy

Teacher research has been identified as a transformative model of CPD. However, as illustrated in the OECD’s TALIS study, while teachers recognise the benefits of classroom enquiry for their own work, their participation in it is low. This paper examines the possible reasons for this discrepancy by considering the views of Irish teachers surveyed during a CPD needs analysis. The data were collected using a national online survey, with both open-ended and closed-ended items, which sought teacher views on different aspects of their engagement in CPD. Following a pilot study, invitations to participate were emailed to all recognised primary and secondary schools throughout Ireland, resulting in a convenience sample of 496 teachers, comprising 227 primary teachers and 269 secondary teachers. The results suggest that the extent to which CPD enables teachers to undertake enquiry that is relevant is key in the minds of teachers. The availability of support for undertaking research, as well as practical issues such as time and cost, are also crucial considerations.     

The impact of school-based continuing professional development: views of teachers and support professionals

Evaluating the impact of school-based continuing professional development (CPD), as with any other kind, is not without its challenges. This article reports on an evaluation of a CPD programme which was established to support implementation of a new primary school curriculum in Ireland. It examines what can be learned by comparing the views on the likely impact held by the teachers participating in the CPD and the support professionals providing it. The results show that both groups were very positive about the likely impact. However, support professionals anticipated a greater impact than the teachers themselves on teachers’ knowledge and implementation of the new curriculum. Likely explanations for these divergent views are discussed. The article highlights the importance of building in mechanisms within CPD to enable both teachers and support professionals to consider together the impact on an ongoing basis, and to use the available evidence formatively to inform planning for CPD. Incorporating a focus on impact in CPD is likely to become even more important in the years ahead given that teachers themselves are increasingly playing a greater role in decisions about what CPD is undertaken.     

商务背景下基于知识共享的跨文化信任影响因素实证研究

基于知识共享、跨文化管理和信任理论,建立了商务背景下基于知识共享的跨文化信任模型,提出了商务背景下基于知识共享的跨文化信任影响因素.在已有文献的基础上,设计调查问卷对西安市软件园的多家企业进行了调查,并运用统计分析软件工具SPSS13.0进行了数据分析.研究发现,在商务背景下,信任者的信任倾向显著影响基于知识共享的跨文化信任结果;被信任者的能力因素对基于知识共享的跨文化信任结果的影响不显著;作为文化差异的一个方面,权力距离影响基于知识共享的跨文化信任结果,但中国跨文化商务背景下的权力距离的影响不像以往研究中发现的那么大.这些发现表明随着经济全球化的发展,国际性商务文化正在凸现,中国与其它国家之间在商务背景下的文化差异方面有所发展和变迁,这些变迁对于商务背景下基于知识共享的跨文化信任产生着深远的影响.     

Replicating Web Structure in Small-Scale Test Collections

Linkage analysis as an aid to web search has been assumed to be of significant benefit and we know that it is being implemented by many major Search Engines. Why then have few TREC participants been able to scientifically prove the benefits of linkage analysis in recent years? In this paper we put forward reasons why many disappointing results have been found in TREC experiments and we identify the linkage density requirements of a dataset to faithfully support experiments into linkage-based retrieval by examining the linkage structure of the WWW. Based on these requirements we report on methodologies for synthesising such a test collection.