‘A strategy of distinction’ unfolds: unsettling the undergraduate outbound mobility experience

Although short-term mobility programmes are increasingly promoted to university students as sources of competitive advantage, there is little research on academic learnings arising from these initiatives. A ‘field analysis’ of outbound mobility is undertaken to identify convergences and disjunctures between institutional discourses, staff perceptions and student experiences at one Australian university where outbound mobility is actively promoted as a ‘strategy of distinction’. Self-reported ‘personal transformations’ commonly associated with the mobility experience are interrogated in favour of alternative constructions of self–other relationships. An argument is made for greater institutional effort to enable students to make critical connections with ‘other-ness’ both in and out of place.     

Exploring solutions for mobile companionship: A design research approach to context-aware management

The mobile phone is not just another device; it is with you day and night, and you rely on its capabilities in work and in private. In short, the mobile phone is your companion. As your companion, it should understand your situational and informational needs. How do we increase the friendliness of your mobile phone, in order to fulfil this promise? In this paper, we explore how context awareness can be used for managing the user mobile experience. To this end, we employed a design research approach to integrate context-aware and cloud based services in an Android application. Through a user evaluation and proof-of-concept implementation we show how new technologies can increase the friendliness of your mobile phone. In so doing, we provide evidence that adaptive applications based on user context offer a fertile ground for taking mobile companionship to the next level.     

Socio-economic predictors of student mobility in Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the determinants of national student mobility under the unified system of admission in Russia and evaluates the barriers which still limit educational mobility. It is argued that even with the Unified State Examination (USE) and the decreased transaction costs of applying to universities, student interregional national mobility is directed towards more developed regional educational markets and richer regions, but is still limited due to the financial constraints in the absence of the additional student support. Russia is an interesting case, because it consists of regions with highly variable socio-economic development and it represents local higher education markets with different levels of competition between universities, which may influence the decision to move. USE was intended to mitigate against these differences, and for political reasons under USE such differences are not considered the main barriers of access to higher education. However, this study takes into account the importance of the institutional characteristics of regions in student mobility.     

Building for a New Generation of Learning: Catalytic Conversations for the Educational Publisher

This article uses the metaphor of building to frame discussion about how we prepare for the provision of learning in the years to come. The intention is to catalyze key conversations that will shape how, where, and why we learn. The principal focus is on areas such as blended learning, mobility, gaming, social networking, holographics, analytics, and the human touch. However, the larger theme involves challenging the reader to vision how we bring the best of traditional education forward, combine it with new technologies and techniques, to reach and teach students well.     

Internationalisation of higher education: European experiences

‘Internationalisation’ is generally defined as increasing cross-border activities amidst persistence of borders, while ‘globalisation’ refers to similar activities concurrent to an erosion of borders. Study mobility is viewed as the most visible component in this framework in Europe with ERASMUS as the largest scheme of temporary mobility. ERASMUS was a trigger for a qualitative leap of internationalisation strategies and policies since the 1990s: towards cooperation and mobility on equal terms, and towards systematic and strategic internationalisation. The ‘Bologna Process’ aimed to make higher education more attractive to students from other parts of the world and to facilitate intra-European mobility; however, many other activities are needed to stimulate mobility, and the Bologna Process pursues many other objectives. It remains to be seen whether supra-national and national policies and institutional strategies will continue to opt for wide-ranging cooperation based on mutual trust or whether the ‘competition paradigm’ will determine the scene.     

Higher education provision using systems thinking approach – case studies

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the complexities involved in higher education provision and how systems thinking and socio-technical systems (STS) thinking approach can be used to understand the education ecosystem. Systems thinking perspective is provided using two case studies: the development of European Learner Mobility (EuroLM) service and the delivery of Enterprise System Management (ESM) course at the Birmingham City University, UK. The case studies present how systems thinking using STS approaches like applied organisational change and Cognitive Work Analysis can be used to capture a conceptual model of the education system for understanding the interactions and relationships between the people, technology, processes and the organisations. Using systems thinking perspective, EuroLM has developed a set of technical standards addressed to the European systems developers and ESM delivery ensures that students communicate and collaborate.     

Staying connected: Effects of social connectedness,cultural intelligence,and socioeconomic status on overseas students’ life satisfaction

This study investigated the relationship between social connectedness and overseas life satisfaction in addition to the mediating effect of cultural intelligence (CQ) and the moderating effect of socioeconomic status (SES) respectively. We adopted the social capital theory to support the relations among the proposed variables. Data were collected through online questionnaires from Taiwanese students studying abroad; 431 valid responses were analyzed. The results demonstrated that social connectedness was positively related to CQ; moreover, CQ was positively related to students’ overseas life satisfaction, and partially mediated the relationship between social connectedness and overseas life satisfaction. Concurrently, SES was observed to moderate the relationships of social connectedness with CQ and CQ with overseas life satisfaction. Furthermore, the indirect effect of social connectedness on overseas life satisfaction through CQ was moderated by varying SES levels. Our findings confirm that social connectedness affects CQ, and that CQ serves as the mediation mechanism between social connectedness and life satisfaction among overseas students. In addition, SES plays a significant role in the moderated mediation relationship. Limitations of this study and recommendations for future studies are also discussed.     

The impact of generation and socioeconomic status on the value of higher education in the UAE: A longitudinal study

This study explores the differences between student and parents’ value orientation for a college degree across a large sample in the UAE. The value of obtaining a higher education degree in the UAE is transgenerational. Salient benefits of a college degree can be categorized by economic, social and entrepreneurial factors and a model is set forth based on an intrinsic/extrinsic and self vs. other continuum. Education and income are related to valuing several educational outcomes. The most important factor identified across generations included both self-transcendence and self-enhancement values. From 2011–2015, the importance of higher education’s social benefits has increased.     

Changes in the Impact of Family Education on Student Educational Achievement in Sweden 1988–2014

The main aim of this study was to investigate the development of the correlation between family education and student achievement in Sweden, which previous research has found to be stable, in spite of increasing school segregation and widening differences in levels of achievement between schools. Based on register data for populations of graduates from compulsory school between 1988 and 2014, correlations between parental education and student grades were estimated. The correlation was found to increase by .04 units between the early-1990s and 2014. The main reasons why this has not been found in previous research are that too coarse a categorization of parental education has been used, a declining quality of measurement of grades, and demographic changes related to immigration.