How do university systems' features affect academic inbreeding? Career rules and language requirements in France, Germany, Italy and Spain

Wastewater surveillance for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is an emerging approach to help identify the risk of a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. This tool can contribute to public health surveillance at both community (wastewater treatment system) and institutional (e.g., colleges, prisons, and nursing homes) scales. This paper explores the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from initial wastewater surveillance efforts at colleges and university systems to inform future research, development and implementation. We present the experiences of 25 college and university systems in the United States that monitored campus wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 during the fall 2020 academic period. We describe the broad range of approaches, findings, resources, and impacts from these initial efforts. These institutions range in size, social and political geographies, and include both public and private institutions. Our analysis suggests that wastewater monitoring at colleges requires consideration of local information needs, sewage infrastructure, resources for sampling and analysis, college and community dynamics, approaches to interpretation and communication of results, and follow-up actions. Most colleges reported that a learning process of experimentation, evaluation, and adaptation was key to progress. This process requires ongoing collaboration among diverse stakeholders including decision-makers, researchers, faculty, facilities staff, students, and community members.

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The Academic Freedom and Responsibilities of Foreign Scholars in African Universities

Issue A Journal of Opinion ◽

10.1017/s0047160700503527 ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 14-32

Author(s):

James S. Coleman

Keyword(s):

Academic Freedom ◽

The Political ◽

Citizenship Status ◽

Historical Experience ◽

University Teachers ◽

Empirical Question ◽

University Systems ◽

Foreign Scholar

“Academic freedom,” Ashby asserts, is “an internationally recognized and unambiguous privilege of university teachers.” Is this proposition confirmed by experience to date as regards the academic freedom of the foreign scholar in African universities? This is the central empirical question. Or is it merely a culture-bound affirmation of a normative ideal which it is hoped might be instituted as a universal right of university teachers, irrespective of citizenship status, tenure of appointments, and the political and university systems in which they serve? Indeed, is it an ideal which can be realized, however imperfectly, or in any event, ought to be categorically affirmed as a privilege of foreign scholars serving in universities anywhere? These are among the questions Ashby’s proposition provokes, and which require, at the outset, some disaggregation of the meanings and interpretations of such a highly normative and emotion-ridden concept, whose genesis and sustenance are undeniably sui generis to a particular cultural and historical experience.

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Assessing the landscape of US postdoctoral salaries

Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education ◽

10.1108/sgpe-d-17-00048 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 213-242 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rodoniki Athanasiadou ◽

Adriana Bankston ◽

McKenzie Carlisle ◽

Caroline A. Niziolek ◽

Gary S. McDowell

Keyword(s):

Geographic Region ◽

Freedom Of Information ◽

Pay Gap ◽

Content Type ◽

Postdoctoral Position ◽

Job Titles ◽

University Systems ◽

The Usa ◽

Job Title ◽

Using Data

Purpose Postdocs make up a significant portion of the biomedical workforce. However, data about the postdoctoral position are generally scarce, and no systematic study of the landscape of individual postdoc salaries in the USA has previously been carried out. The purpose of this study was to assess actual salaries for postdocs using data gathered from US public institutions; determine how these salaries may vary with postdoc title, institutional funding and geographic region; and reflect on which institutional and federal policy measures may have the greatest impact on salaries nationally. Design/methodology/approach Freedom of Information Act Requests were submitted to US public universities or university systems containing campuses with at least 300 science, engineering and health postdocs, according to the 2015 National Science Foundation’s Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering. Salaries and job titles of postdocs as of December 1, 2016, were requested. Findings Salaries and job titles for nearly 14,000 postdocs at 52 US institutions around December 1, 2016, were received. Individual postdoc names were also received for approximately 7,000 postdocs, and departmental affiliations were received for 4,000 postdocs. This exploratory study shows evidence of a postdoc gender pay gap, a significant influence of job title on postdoc salary and a complex relationship between salaries and the level of institutional National Institutes of Health/NSF funding. Originality/value These results provide insights into the ability of institutions to collate and report out annualized salary data on their postdocs, highlighting difficulties faced in tracking and reporting data on this population by institutional administration. Ultimately, these types of efforts, aimed at increasing transparency regarding the postdoctoral position, may lead to improved support for postdocs at all US institutions and allow greater agency for postdocs making decisions based on financial concerns.

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Critical Pedagogy and assessment in higher education: The ideal of ‘authenticity’ in learning

Active Learning in Higher Education ◽

10.1177/1469787417723244 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 9-21 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Maria Martinez Serrano ◽

Mark O’Brien ◽

Krystal Roberts ◽

David Whyte

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

Critical Pedagogy ◽

Student Expectations ◽

Potential Harm ◽

University Systems ◽

Assessment In Higher Education ◽

Final Degree ◽

The Ideal

Current forms of marketisation in university systems create pressures towards purely ends-focused expectations among students and have implications for learning and assessment processes. The potential harm that these trends have on ‘learning’ should be resisted by educators and students alike. Critical Pedagogy approaches offer one way of conceptualising and implementing such resistance in the interests of ‘authenticity’ in learning. However, the issue becomes sharpest at the point of assessment. Here, the ideals of Critical Pedagogy can collide with student expectations of final degree success. By addressing the question of ‘authenticity’ for assessment in relation to Critical Pedagogy, this article explores the challenges posed by this conundrum and draws upon interviews conducted with module leaders who apply recognisably (although not explicitly) Critical Pedagogy principles in their teaching and in the types of assessment they use. The themes that emerged present a picture of the kinds of potential that Critical Pedagogy influenced forms of assessment have for supporting authenticity in learning, as well as the difficulties involved in its application. It also helps to trace out the possible boundaries for further inquiry.

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Postgraduate Supervision in the United Kingdom and Germany: A Comparative Study of Factors Influencing the Supervisory Relationship

Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice ◽

10.14297/jpaap.v6i2.306 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 51-57

Author(s):

Omar Feraboli

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Comparative Study ◽

Academic Environment ◽

Supervisory Relationship ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Factors Influencing ◽

University Systems ◽

Phd Supervision ◽

Personal Reflections ◽

German Universities

This paper aims to examine and assess the approaches to postgraduate supervision in the United Kingdom (UK) and in Germany; the factors determining the differences between the two approaches and investigating their impact on the PhD supervision relationship. I combine personal reflections and experiences with the existing literature and with indices of performance and level of internationalisation of British and German universities. I examine several aspects and factors that affect the academic environment and hence determine differences across the British and German university systems, which are finally reflected in the approaches to postgraduate supervision.

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Exploring the Potentialities of Automatic Extraction of University Webometric Information

Journal of Data and Information Science ◽

10.2478/jdis-2020-0040 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (4) ◽

pp. 43-55

Author(s):

Gianpiero Bianchi ◽

Renato Bruni ◽

Cinzia Daraio ◽

Antonio Laureti Palma ◽

Giulio Perani ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Text Mining ◽

Web Mining ◽

Knowledge Extraction ◽

Automatic Extraction ◽

Mining Operations ◽

Automatic Data ◽

Link Type ◽

Web Scraping ◽

University Systems ◽

The Web

AbstractPurposeThe main objective of this work is to show the potentialities of recently developed approaches for automatic knowledge extraction directly from the universities’ websites. The information automatically extracted can be potentially updated with a frequency higher than once per year, and be safe from manipulations or misinterpretations. Moreover, this approach allows us flexibility in collecting indicators about the efficiency of universities’ websites and their effectiveness in disseminating key contents. These new indicators can complement traditional indicators of scientific research (e.g. number of articles and number of citations) and teaching (e.g. number of students and graduates) by introducing further dimensions to allow new insights for “profiling” the analyzed universities.Design/methodology/approachWebometrics relies on web mining methods and techniques to perform quantitative analyses of the web. This study implements an advanced application of the webometric approach, exploiting all the three categories of web mining: web content mining; web structure mining; web usage mining. The information to compute our indicators has been extracted from the universities’ websites by using web scraping and text mining techniques. The scraped information has been stored in a NoSQL DB according to a semi-structured form to allow for retrieving information efficiently by text mining techniques. This provides increased flexibility in the design of new indicators, opening the door to new types of analyses. Some data have also been collected by means of batch interrogations of search engines (Bing, www.bing.com) or from a leading provider of Web analytics (SimilarWeb, http://www.similarweb.com). The information extracted from the Web has been combined with the University structural information taken from the European Tertiary Education Register (https://eter.joanneum.at/#/home), a database collecting information on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) at European level. All the above was used to perform a clusterization of 79 Italian universities based on structural and digital indicators.FindingsThe main findings of this study concern the evaluation of the potential in digitalization of universities, in particular by presenting techniques for the automatic extraction of information from the web to build indicators of quality and impact of universities’ websites. These indicators can complement traditional indicators and can be used to identify groups of universities with common features using clustering techniques working with the above indicators.Research limitationsThe results reported in this study refers to Italian universities only, but the approach could be extended to other university systems abroad.Practical implicationsThe approach proposed in this study and its illustration on Italian universities show the usefulness of recently introduced automatic data extraction and web scraping approaches and its practical relevance for characterizing and profiling the activities of universities on the basis of their websites. The approach could be applied to other university systems.Originality/valueThis work applies for the first time to university websites some recently introduced techniques for automatic knowledge extraction based on web scraping, optical character recognition and nontrivial text mining operations (Bruni & Bianchi, 2020).

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Multi-Site Bilingual Team-Based Grounded Theory Research: A Retrospective Methodological Review

The Qualitative Report ◽

10.46743/2160-3715/2018.3362 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Annie Pullen Sansfaçon ◽

Amy Fulton ◽

Marion Brown ◽

John Graham ◽

Stéphanie Ethier

Keyword(s):

Grounded Theory ◽

Large Scale ◽

Successful Management ◽

Methodological Review ◽

Virtual Spaces ◽

Grounded Theory Study ◽

Project Completion ◽

Grounded Theory Research ◽

University Systems ◽

Theory Research

Successful management of a multi-site bilingual team-based grounded theory study requires overcoming key challenges associated with implementation of a large-scale, multi-faceted project. This article retrospectively reviews the methodological strategies employed during a multi-site bilingual team-based grounded theory study that investigated the professional adaptation experiences of migrant social workers in Canada. The article presents the strategies that the research team engaged to overcome numerous challenges and successfully work together across a variety of contexts and systems, including (a) provincial contexts, (b) languages, (c) university systems, (d) virtual spaces, and (e) epistemological perspectives. The findings highlight the importance of leadership and teamwork as central to successful project completion.

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