(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]
(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]