(2016). Measuring the Return on Investment in TVET. Report of the UNESCO-UNEVOC Virtual Conference, 9-16 May 2016. UNESCO-UNEVOC International Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training Sustainable Development Goals call on Members States to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" and sets a number of targets related to technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In order to collect input from the global TVET community, UNESCO-UNEVOC organized a virtual conference from May 9-16, 2016 on the UNEVOC TVeT Forum. Moderated by Phil Loveder and John Stanwick from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research in Australia, a UNEVOC Centre, this virtual conference sought to inform the wider TVET community about a current research project currently undertaken by the NCVER. The collaborative research project aims to identify and highlight key issues in the measurement of the return on investment in TVET, and the virtual conference was an opportunity for the community to share their ideas, expertise and experiences with the research team. This virtual conference was the fifteenth in a… [PDF]

Liu, Ying; Xia, Jingfeng (2013). Usage Patterns of Open Genomic Data. College & Research Libraries, v74 n2 p195-207 Mar. This paper uses Genome Expression Omnibus (GEO), a data repository in biomedical sciences, to examine the usage patterns of open data repositories. It attempts to identify the degree of recognition of data reuse value and understand how e-science has impacted a large-scale scholarship. By analyzing a list of 1,211 publications that cite GEO data to support their independent studies, it discovers that free data can support a wealth of high-quality investigations, that the rate of open data use keeps growing over the years, and that scholars in different countries show different rates of complying with data-sharing policies…. [Direct]

Horney, Marc R. (2013). Database Application for a Youth Market Livestock Production Education Program. Journal of Extension, v51 n1 Article 1TOT3 Feb. This article offers an example of a database designed to support teaching animal production and husbandry skills in county youth livestock programs. The system was used to manage production goals, animal growth and carcass data, photos and other imagery, and participant records. These were used to produce a variety of customized reports to help guide leaders and members through the project animal selection and management process and evaluate progress over time. The chief advantage of the system is in its utility in reducing the effort required to perform the many communication and information-sharing tasks that were necessary for success…. [PDF]

Gupta, C. A. Pallavi; Marwaha, Tushar; Singh, Bharti (2013). Relationship between Social Media and Academic Performance in Distance Education. Universal Journal of Educational Research, v1 n3 p185-190. The scope and method of imparting distance education to the learner has evolved over a period of time. Various models of distance education have been introduced over the years; the latest introduction is the use of Web 2.0 technologies to make distance learning more analytical, flexible, interactive, and collaborative for both the teacher and the taught. This research paper has assessed the purpose of usage of social media tools, specifically Facebook, Blogs, Google groups, SkyDrive and Twitter by the students for academic purposes. Further, the relationship between usage of Facebook and academic performance of students has been tested statistically. The study reveals that majority of the students access various social media tools for information sharing and personal interaction. The academic performance of the students is independent of the use of Facebook as a social media tool for academic purpose…. [PDF]

Care, Esther; Kim, Helyn; Vista, Alvin (2020). Optimizing Assessment for All: Focus on Asia. Center for Universal Education at The Brookings Institution This paper marks the second in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All (OAA) project at Brookings to strengthen education systems capacity to integrate 21st century skills into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. Twenty-first century skills (21CS) are now firmly entrenched as learning goals in education systems worldwide, but their actual implementation in teaching and assessment practices is lagging behind. With these learning goals–which prioritize how to get answers rather than just providing a correct response–we are facing new challenges and exploring new solutions. This report describes the collaborative activities undertaken by the OAA project with three countries in Asia–Cambodia, Mongolia, and Nepal–to create 21CS assessment tasks. OAA and partners worked with the countries to identify the 21CS skills that countries value, hypothesized what these skills might look like in classroom… [PDF]

Hallinger, Philip; Lu, Jiafang (2014). Modelling the Effects of Principal Leadership and School Capacity on Teacher Professional Learning in Hong Kong Primary Schools. School Leadership & Management, v34 n5 p481-501. Over the past 30 years, school principals have been exhorted to articulate a clear vision as a key tool for stimulating the improvement of teaching and learning in their schools. Over the past decade, as school systems have sought to distribute leadership more broadly within schools, the same imperative has applied to middle-level leaders. Indeed, a key assumption underlying the move towards sharing leadership responsibilities more broadly has been the belief that this would strengthen collective efforts and reduce the gap between goals and outcomes. Yet, to date, there have relatively few investigations of the extent to which middle-level leaders are contributing to school improvement efforts. This study sought to understand how shared vision within school management teams (SMTs) impacts teacher commitment and teacher support for students through school alignment and coherence. Dyad survey data were collected from 411 SMT members and 559 teachers at 32 primary schools in Hong Kong…. [Direct]

Kathayoon A. Khalil (2014). Social Learning Systems in Zoo and Aquarium Education: Networks and Communities of Practice. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University. Humans are social animals. We connect with others for a range of reasons including support, overcoming challenges, and to help us learn, among others. Though learning can occur in a variety of social contexts, the workplace is a particularly interesting venue, given the amount of time we spend at work and the potential consequences and benefits of what we learn. Learning in professional settings often occurs through interactions with colleagues. These connections can affect what kinds and how effectively work is accomplished. Because of the potential importance of learning related to professional practice, and the impacts of these outcomes, this is a fruitful area of research. This dissertation is comprised of three papers studying the nature of learning in a social workplace setting. In all three studies, I consider relationships among education professionals at zoos and aquariums to understand the roles of individuals in a networked learning community and the ways in which… [Direct]

Camacho-Mi√±ano, Maria Jos√©; MacIsaac, Sarah; Rich, Emma (2019). Postfeminist Biopedagogies of Instagram: Young Women Learning about Bodies, Health and Fitness. Sport, Education and Society, v24 n6 p651-664. Social media can become a site of public pedagogy (Rich, E., & Miah, A. (2014). Understanding digital health as public pedagogy: A critical framework. "Societies," 4(2), 296-315. doi:10.3390/soc4020296) through which young people learn about health and fitness. Photo and video-sharing social networks are emerging as sites of media practices through which images of the perfect fit body circulate, popularly known as 'fitspiration' media. Our research examines how girls and young women negotiate contemporary discourses around body, health and fitness circulating through Instagram and the subjectivities such technology enables. We draw on participatory and collaborative research with young women from three Spanish Secondary schools who each engaged with exercise-related content on Instagram and who self-defined as physically active. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews explored participants' uses, meanings and influences of this digital content over their embodiment… [Direct]

Davies, Helen; Harris, Deborah; Trotman, Dave (2014). "Nice to Think I'm Not on My Own": Lessons from an Arts-Based Workshop in an Urban Children's Centre. Education 3-13, v42 n5 p554-562. This paper reports the evaluation of an arts-based programme designed to encourage parental participation in an urban Children's Centre. The programme was aimed to explore the possible beneficial effects of arts-based activity as a means of engaging "hard to reach" parents more fully in the services of the centre. Practical workshops were designed for parents and their children and delivered over a 10-week period. From the evidence garnered in the evaluation, the potential of arts activities as a means to improve parental participation remains uncertain. Of greater significance, however, observations by parents and facilitators revealed that arts-based activities were a powerful dialogic tool for mediating interactions between parent and child. In particular, dance, drama and music emerged as powerful conduits for dialogic encounters with media-based activities offering previously unforeseen opportunities for the sharing of family lifeworlds…. [Direct]

Bowe, B.; Hegedus, A.; Tarasawa, B.; Thum, Y. M.; Yun, X. (2015). Keeping Learning on Track: A Case-Study of Formative Assessment Practice and Its Impact on Learning in Meridian School District. Northwest Evaluation Association In partnership with Joint School District 2 in Meridian, Idaho, this theory-driven study assessed the impact of Keeping Learning on Track Æ (KLT‚Ñ¢), a professional development program pioneered by Dylan Wiliam and his colleagues at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). A team of Northwest Evaluation Association‚Ñ¢ (NWEA‚Ñ¢) researchers surveyed teachers and students over two academic years (2012-13, 2013-14) to examine which elements of the program, and under what conditions, we saw the greatest impact on 1) the use of formative assessment instructional practices in the classroom and, 2) changes in student achievement measures in reading and mathematics. Our results were generally positive. The findings suggest that KLT influenced teacher practices and student engagement over time. Teacher and student survey responses report successful adoption of the five key formative assessment strategies. Additionally, participants reported positive evaluations of their KLT experience and cited… [PDF]

Jenkins, Martin; Voce, Julie; Walker, Richard (2016). Charting the Development of Technology-Enhanced Learning Developments across the UK Higher Education Sector: A Longitudinal Perspective (2001-2012). Interactive Learning Environments, v24 n3 p438-455. This article reviews key findings from six surveys of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) across the UK higher education (HE) sector, conducted by Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association in association with Jisc. Updating the findings presented by Jenkins, Browne, Walker, and Hewitt [2010. The development of technology enhanced learning: Findings from a 2008 survey of UK higher education institutions, "Interactive Learning Environments." First published on: 22 January 2010 (iFirst)], the article reports on the emerging and planned patterns of TEL across the UK HE sector over the last decade. Our analysis shows that against the backdrop of Higher Education Funding Council for England capital funding, institutions have made considerable investments in technology and infrastructure to support learning and teaching–specifically in the domain of learning management and assessment systems. While the drivers for TEL development have consistently focused on… [Direct]

Romine, William L.; Sadler, Troy D. (2016). Measuring Changes in Interest in Science and Technology at the College Level in Response to Two Instructional Interventions. Research in Science Education, v46 n3 p309-327 Jun. Improving interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is crucial to widening participation and success in STEM studies at the college level. To understand how classroom and extracurricular interventions affect interest, it is necessary to have appropriate measurement tools. We describe the adaptation and revalidation of a previously existing multidimensional instrument to the end of measuring interest in environmental science and technology in college nonscience majors. We demonstrate the revised instrument's ability to detect change in this group over an 8-week time period. While collection of demographic information was not part of the study design, participating students were similar in that they hailed from three environmental science nonmajor classes sharing a common syllabus and instructional delivery method. Change in interest was measured in response to two types of scientific literature-based learning approaches: a scientific practice approach and a… [Direct]

O'Connor, Dee (2016). The Golden Thread: Educator Connectivity as a Central Pillar in the Development of Creativity through Childhood Education. an Irish Life History Study. Education 3-13, v44 n6 p671-681. This paper presents the narratives of five creative Irish Adults who contributed to the study by sharing their childhood education experiences. The five participants are all of different ages and occupations. All identify themselves as highly creative people and all worked with me over the course of this study to identify how this creativity developed within their engagement with the Irish childhood education system. All excelled with higher education and they share a high degree of success within their careers. Between them, they express their creativity across five key genres. These are: Science, Engineering, The Arts, Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship. Well-developed themes were analysed to identify interrelationships which formed a theoretical framework of core concepts that demonstrate what holds great importance in the lives of these participants for the development of their creativity during childhood education in Ireland. A clear theme of this study was that of… [Direct]

Davies, John; Stewart, Scott; Weeks, Richard (1998). Knowledge Sharing over the World Wide Web. This paper describes a system that facilitates and encourages the sharing of knowledge among groups of users within or across organizations. KSE (Knowledge Sharing Environment) is a system of information agents for organizing, summarizing, and sharing knowledge from a number of sources, including the World Wide Web, an organization's internal intranet, or other users. Users are organized into closed user groups or communities of interest with related or overlapping interests, such as members of a project team, students studying the same subject (perhaps at different institutions), or members of an organizational department. As well as sharing explicit (codified) knowledge, sharing of tacit knowledge is encouraged via automatic suggestion of and support for contact between people with mutual concerns or interests. Following a brief discussion of storing and organizing knowledge in KSE, the paper focuses on the following topics related to tacit and explicit knowledge in KSE: (1) ways… [PDF]

Otrel-Cass, Kathrin; Williams, P. John (2017). Teacher and Student Reflections on ICT-Rich Science Inquiry. Research in Science & Technological Education, v35 n1 p88-107. Background: Inquiry learning in science provides authentic and relevant contexts in which students can create knowledge to solve problems, make decisions and find solutions to issues in today's world. The use of electronic networks can facilitate this interaction, dialogue and sharing, and adds a new dimension to classroom pedagogy. Purpose: This is a report of teacher and student reflections on some of the tensions, reconciliations and feelings they experienced as they worked together to engage in inquiry learning. The study sought to find out how networked ICT use might offer new and different ways for students to engage with, explore and communicate science ideas within inquiry. Sample: This project developed case studies with 6 science teachers of year 9 and 10 students, with an average age of 13 and 14 years in three New Zealand high schools. Teacher participants in the project had varying levels of understanding and experience with inquiry learning in science. Teacher knowledge… [Direct]

Kendrick, Noelle K. (2019). Organizational Learning in Higher Education: Exploring One Institution's Efforts to Meet the Emerging Changes in the Higher Education Landscape. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, Northeastern University. The purpose of this single, descriptive case study was to gain new insight into how members of a successful higher education institution–Virtual U–are learning to adapt to the dynamic and ever-changing environment. This study examined one successful institution of higher education that has experienced exponential financial and student growth in a time where other colleges and universities are struggling to survive. This institution began as a small brick and mortar institution in the northeast that was faced with fears of its own mortality and has since become one of the largest providers of online education in the United States serving more than 130,000 students. The over-arching research question sought to understand how organizational members describe their organizational learning system. The findings revealed that Virtual U's dynamic social system reflects a relative balance of learning and performance actions. Findings revealed evidence of learning actions in terms of how… [Direct]

Yin, Steven (2022). Essays on Online Learning and Resource Allocation. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University. This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the Bass demand model. The main objective in the field of dynamic pricing and learning is to study how a seller can maximize revenue by adjusting price over time based on sequentially realized demand. Unlike most existing literature on dynamic pricing and learning, where the price only affects the demand in the current period, under the Bass model, price also influences the future evolution of demand. Finding are venue-maximizing dynamic pricing policy in this model is non-trivial even in the full information case, where model parameters are known. We consider the more challenging "incomplete information" problem where dynamic pricing is… [Direct]

Amanda Kathleen Earl (2024). Supporting Indigenous Languages and Knowledges through Higher Education: A Study of Decolonial Pedagogy at an Intercultural University in Mexico. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University. The creation of "universidades interculturales" (intercultural universities, UIs) in Mexico at the start of the 21st century was not only a policy response to the need for more accessible higher education for historically underrepresented students, but also to the call for more culturally and linguistically relevant education and development made by the Indigenous rights movement. However, because of the history of colonialism in Latin America and the use of state schooling to assimilate citizens into a homogenous Mexican nation, the goal of supporting cultural and linguistic diversity through public education presents tensions and contradictions. For some, UIs promise the possibility of revalorizing subaltern knowledges, promoting Indigenous activism, and protecting the human and cultural rights enshrined in international and national law. For others, they represent a continuation of top-down polices dominated by policymakers who are not intimately familiar with Indigenous… [Direct]

Kalelioglu, Filiz (2016). Twitter in Education: Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers. World Journal on Educational Technology: Current Issues, v8 n3 p165-171. The aim of this study is to determine the perceptions of students with regard to the use of Twitter within education. Participants of the study were 17 junior class Education Faculty students from the Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department of a private university in Turkey. At the beginning of the course, the instructor requested students to sign up for Twitter and follow her tweets. Then the instructor created a hashtag for the lesson and, over the duration of the course, shared course announcements and related papers using this hashtag. Students also tweeted about the summary course content covered during face-to-face lessons. At the end of the course, a questionnaire captured students' perceptions with regard to the use of Twitter within education through five open-ended questions. Content analysis was applied to analyse the qualitative data. By using Twitter in their courses, participants had the opportunity to engage in what they described as a different,… [PDF]

Ansah, Samuel Kwame; Awere, Eric; Edu-Buandoh, Kobina Badu Micah (2016). Relevance of Partnering as an Alternative Approach to Management of Construction Projects in Ghana. Journal of Education and Practice, v7 n14 p141-149. Understandably, clients in both the public and the private sectors in Ghanaian construction industry have become increasingly dissatisfied. What they see is unpredictability and under-performance. What they receive is too often of poor quality, late and over-priced. More often contractors enter the construction project focusing on achieving their objectives and maximising their profit margins, with no regard for the impacts on others. This mind set leads to conflict, litigation and often a disastrous project. In the pursuit of performance excellence, there is a need for partnering. This paper therefore, attempts to explain the need for partnering as an alternative approach to construction project delivery. The paper presents a review of partnering projects in general. Through a postal and e-mailed questionnaire survey, opinions of various parties in Ghanaian construction industry–clients, sub-contractors and contractors were sought regarding construction project delivery and the… [PDF]

Gardner, Laura; Minnich, Elizabeth; Sorkin, Brenda (2016). In the Presence of Teaching: Reflections from a Project. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, v48 n3 p60-66. Talking together about their teaching in very different fields–philosophy, art, movement education/somatics–the authors realized that there was something startlingly similar and valuable about what they were trying to teach and that it was somehow expressed in the elusive but crucial "how" of their actual teaching. How they teach is never neutral. It suggests to their students ways of relating to themselves, their own experiences, interests, hopes, problems, their peers, authorities, knowledge–the world. For three years, the authors discussed what they actually do when teaching: describing, questioning, reflecting; sharing writing; discerning recurrent themes as they observed characteristics, qualities, and, importantly, values. What, they kept asking, is the why that informs the how of the way they teach? They agreed that, whatever science may contribute to it, teaching itself is an art, often–when purposefully focused in the unique present moment, on the presence of… [Direct]

James, Jeffrey (2011). Low-Cost Computers for Education in Developing Countries. Social Indicators Research, v103 n3 p399-408 Sep. This paper studies the distribution of computer use in a comparison between two of the most dominant suppliers of low-cost computers for education in developing countries (partly because they involve diametrically opposite ways of tackling the problem). The comparison is made in the context of an analytical framework which traces the changing characteristics of products as income rises over time. The crucial distinction turns out to be the way sharing is handled in the two cases. In the one no sharing is allowed while in the other sharing is the basis of the entire product design. Put somewhat differently, the one computer is intensive in a high-income characteristic whereas the other relies entirely on a low-income characteristic. (Contains 1 table, 5 figures, and 9 footnotes.)… [Direct]

Buzzetto-More, Nicole; Elobaid, Muna; Johnson, Robert (2015). Communicating and Sharing in the Semantic Web: An Examination of Social Media Risks, Consequences, and Attitudinal Awareness. Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Lifelong Learning, v11 p47-66. Empowered by and tethered to ubiquitous technologies, the current generation of youth yearns for opportunities to engage in self-expression and information sharing online with personal disclosure no longer governed by concepts of propriety and privacy. This raises issues about the unsafe online activities of teens and young adults. The following paper presents the findings of a study examining the social networking activities of undergraduate students and also highlights a program to increase awareness of the dangers and safe practices when using and communicating, via social media. According to the survey results, young adults practice risky social networking site (SNS) behaviors with most having experienced at least one negative consequence. Further, females were more likely than males to engage in oversharing as well as to have experienced negative consequences. Finally, results of a post-treatment survey found that a targeted program that includes flyers, posters, YouTube videos,… [PDF]

Maticka-Tyndale, Eleanor; Wiebe, Natasha G. (2017). More and Better Grant Proposals? The Evaluation of a Grant-Writing Group at a Mid-Sized Canadian University. Journal of Research Administration, v48 n2 p67-92 Fall. Obtaining external funding has become increasingly difficult for Canadian researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Our literature review suggests that grant-writing groups and workshops make an important contribution to increasing both applications for external funding and success in funding competitions. This article describes an 8-month grant-writing group for 14 social scientists in a mid-sized Canadian university. The goal was to increase applications and successes in funding competitions. The group integrated several strategies perceived by Porter (2011b) to encourage more and better grant proposals: offering "homegrown" workshops that were ongoing rather than occasional, sharing successful proposals, coaching and editing, bringing together emerging researchers with established ones, and placing participants in reviewers' shoes. These strategies were combined in a series of monthly sessions that required participants to write each section of a grant proposal… [PDF]

Alsharo, Mohammad K. (2013). Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Teams: The Impact on Trust, Collaboration, and Team Effectiveness. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado at Denver. Virtual teams are utilized by organizations to gather experts to collaborate online in order to accomplish organizational tasks. However, the characteristics of these teams create challenges to effective collaboration and effective team outcome. Collaboration is an essential component of teamwork, the notion of forming teams in organizations is the need for members with complementary skills and expertise to collaborate in order to achieve the goal for which the team is established. Literature on virtual teams has been growing for over a decade with researchers investigating different aspects of virtual work. Trust among virtual team members has been investigated by information systems researchers as a crucial challenge for virtual teams success. Knowledge sharing and management in virtual teams has been the focus of recent research studies as it represents a challenge in virtual work environments; specifically because the knowledge is scattered among geographically distributed team… [Direct]

McKinney-Bock, Katherine S. (2013). Building Phrase Structure from Items and Contexts. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Southern California. This dissertation aims to revisit foundational issues in syntactic theory regarding cyclicity and displacement. I take narrow syntax to operate over domains ("phases") more local than in current Minimalism. To do this, I define a notion of "phase overlap" which involves the sharing of grammatical features across two independent phases. Phase overlap applies to phases involved in the construction of argument structure, e.g., linking subject and object phases, in further building clausal structure, as well as in embedding of complement clauses, and phase overlap also plays a role in A-bar constructions, such as relativization. To overlap phases, I take the idea that "generalized binary connectives" build phrase structure (Vergnaud forthcoming), and extend it in such a way that it gives rise to phases that involve parallel nominal and verbal domains, rather than treating the verbal domain as "privileged". In this dissertation, both the verbal and… [Direct]

Lloyd, Margaret; Nykvist, Shaun; Skyring, Carol (2015). Teacher Professional Conversations–The oz-Teachers Story. Australian Educational Computing, v30 n2. The oz-Teachers listserv, an email list for teachers, ran continuously for 20 years, from 1995 to 2015. It provided the technical infrastructure for professional communication with the majority of its members being Australian teachers based in classrooms across the country. An analysis of the list archives provides us with interesting insights as to how teachers learn from and within communities of their peers and how such communities offer social and educational affordances to allow teachers to generate and enhance their own learning. This paper begins with a brief review of the response to the announcement of the list's closure. It then moves to a report of the types of communication which emerged from the list over time with comparisons drawn from extant research, namely, an early analysis of email lists and a more contemporary study of teacher communication through microblogging. We identified 14 categories with eight of these being paired, namely, as asking/seeking and… [Direct]

Allen, David; Blythe, Tina; Dichter, Alan; Lynch, Terra (2018). Protocols in the Classroom: Tools to Help Students Read, Write, Think, and Collaborate. Teachers College Press For nearly 2 decades, "Looking Together at Student Work" and "The Power of Protocols" have sustained educators in their professional learning. "Protocols in the Classroom" expands the scope of those books from teachers' professional learning to include students' learning, providing teachers with the tools they need to use discussion protocols to support students in developing crucial skills and habits as readers, writers, critical thinkers, and active participants within the classroom community. This essential guide provides detailed descriptions of protocols for four critical purposes: (1) Entering into and engaging with texts of many different types; (2) Sharing perspectives on questions, issues, or topics; (3) Giving and receiving important feedback on works in progress; and (5) Exploring one's own unique learning style. For each protocol the authors provide a clear set of steps, tips for teachers and students in facilitating the protocol, and a story… [Direct]

Rolfe, Vivien (2012). Open Educational Resources: Staff Attitudes and Awareness. Research in Learning Technology, v20 n1. Attitudes are changing in education globally to promote the open sharing of educational courses and resources. The aim of this study was to explore staff awareness and attitudes towards "open educational resources" (OER) as a benchmark for monitoring future progress. Faculty staff (n = 6) were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews that facilitated the development of a questionnaire. Staff respondents (n = 50) were not familiar with the term OER but had a clear notion of what it meant. They were familiar with open content repositories within the university but not externally. A culture of borrowing and sharing of resources exists between close colleagues, but not further a field, and whilst staff would obtain resources from the Internet, they were reticent to place materials there. Drivers for mobilising resources included a strong belief in open education, the ability of OER to enhance individual and institutional reputations and economic factors. Barriers to… [Direct]

Prebil, Michael (2020). Tech Apprenticeship in the San Francisco Bay Area. New America The nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area enjoy the greatest advantages of the innovation economy. The Bay Area accounted for nearly $1 trillion in economic productivity in 2018; the only metropolitan area with a higher per-capita gross domestic product was oil-rich and comparatively tiny Midland, Texas. Unemployment in most Bay Area counties is less than 2.5 percent. "The city is filthy rich in what other regions crave," wrote the Washington Post last year: "Growth, start-ups, high-paying jobs, educated young people, soaring property values, commercial and residential construction, a vibrant street life, and so much disposable revenue." But the Bay Area's tech economy also gives rise to its worst afflictions. Costs of living are higher than anywhere in the country, pricing low- and middle-income residents out of housing near the strongest job markets. Gig services provided by ride-sharing and delivery companies worth billions of dollars strain public… [PDF]