scholarly journals Moving to open educational resources at Athabasca University: A case study

Author(s):  
Cindy Ives ◽  
Mary Margaret Pringle

<p>Since the birth of the World Wide Web, educators have been exchanging ideas and sharing resources online. They are all aware of the turmoil in higher education created by freely available content, including some hopeful developments charted in this issue. Interest has grown steadily over the past decade in making a university-level education openly available to students around the globe who would otherwise be overlooked, and recommendations for how to do this are well documented (e.g., UNESCO, 2002; OECD, 2007). Initiatives in the United States (Thille, 2012), Canada (Stacey, 2011b), Africa (OER Africa, n.d.), and the United Kingdom (JISC, 2012) are easily accessed and case studies abound (e.g., Barrett, Grover, Janowski, van Lavieren, Ojo, &amp; Schmidt, 2009). Supporting the widespread availability of OER is a goal that Athabasca University (AU) has embraced through association with the Commonwealth of Learning and by becoming a charter member of the OER University (OERu, 2011). The use of OER in AU programs has strategic local implications that go beyond the five reasons for institutions to engage in OER projects described by Hylén (2006). Recently at AU explorations have begun into the potential of using OER in course design and production.</p>

Author(s):  
Clint Randles

The proliferation of the use of new media and creativities are expanding the ways that humans engage creatively with music in the twenty-first century. As teachers and researchers, our methods of assessing these creativities need to expand as well. In this chapter the author points to some of the ways that music education has traditionally conceived of both creativity and the measurement of compositional activity in the classroom. However, it should be clear that formative, summative, feedback, diagnostic, and evaluative assessment are all necessary and vital to understanding and justifying the place of composition learning in music education, and that we as a profession have not done an adequate job of it in the past. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, Finland, and Australia, have done a better job of creating curricular space for composition than the United States. The rest of the world can learn from these successes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Compton-Lilly ◽  
Jieun Kim ◽  
Erin Quast ◽  
Sarah Tran ◽  
Stephanie Shedrow

In the past, physical barriers such as geography and distance limited global communication. In this paper, we explore how young children in immigrant families engage in transnational literacy practices. Specifically, we explore the transnational funds of knowledge that result from those experiences. This three-year longitudinal collective case study involves ten children from immigrant families who have come to the United States from around the world. The students entered the study in four-year-old kindergarten, grade 1 or grade 2. Each year, we collected observations, spoken data and student-created artefacts (e.g. writing samples, maps, photographs). Data sources were designed to highlight the various spaces that the immigrant families occupy or have occupied over time (i.e. home/neighbourhood/ school; native country/country of residence). Our reading and rereading of coded data across the sample led us to focus on families’ digital transnational practices and children’s transnational awareness. We argue that these funds of knowledge should be recognized in classrooms and schools and that they have the potential to contribute to the nurturing of cosmopolitan perspectives for all children.


2012 ◽  
Vol 144 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McKnight

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using his news media. Murdoch himself is probably the most influential Australian of all time. He says the recent News of the World hacking scandal went ‘went against everything [he stands] for’. But how true is this? He sees himself as an anti-establishment rebel, yet his influence in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States makes him part of a global elite. He has become one of the key promoters of neo-liberal ideology of small government and deregulation over the past 30 years. The basis of his philosophy was expressed by one of his former editors, David Montgomery, who said ‘Rupert has contempt for the rules. Contempt even for governments.’ Murdoch is also a devotee of the neo-conservative wing of the US Republican Party. The possibility of exercising power through ownership of the news media has been little studied in recent years, but Murdoch's role in English-speaking countries over the last 30 years shows that perhaps we need to look again at such media theories.


Author(s):  
Yuvraj Singh Bhadauriya ◽  
Vishal Singh ◽  
Suneel Kumar

One of the most common issues on the word right now is green building technology, with the goal of reducing the development industry's various negative effects on the environment, society, and economy. Because pollution and global warming are quickly expanding over the planet, the world urgently requires a sustainable and reasonable development. Because of the increase in Green House Gases (GHGs), dramatic climatical differences occurring everyday have been noted and are being faced by almost everyone all over the world. Within settled countries such as the United States of America, Russia, Australia, and the United Kingdom, there have already been rigorous steps taken to achieve workable development, as well as rules and regulations enacted by their respective governments to assist and accomplish a workable and environmentally approachable development of their countries. However, emerging countries such as India, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and others are dragging in terms of founding supportable growth and environmentally friendly structures. In addition, there is a deficiency of public understanding about this worldwide issue in these emerging countries. According to surveys and study, these countries are also far behind schedule the established nations of the world. This article discusses the need for maintainable growth around the world, particularly in emerging countries such as India and China, which have enormous land-living masses and are fast emerging, with the potential to become new global superpowers in the near future. It also includes sustainable and monetary research with connections to Indian contexts, as well as a recent live instance study of a freshly built and constructed luxurious housing home in a densely populated area of India. The case study is a inhabited house that is planned and built as a sustainable and green structure in an extremely community inside the state of Maharashtra, India, as India is also known as a country of villages with


Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 382 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Feener ◽  
Philip Fountain

Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which ‘religion’ and ‘development’ interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. These non-Christian cases from traditions outside contexts of major western nations provide windows on a complex, global history that considerably complicates what have come to be established narratives privileging the agency of major institutional players in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this way we seek to move discussions toward more conceptual and comparative reflections that can facilitate better understandings of the implications of contemporary entanglements of religion and development.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-496
Author(s):  
Lewis L. Coriell

THERE has been a recent increase in inquiries concerning the present practice of smallpox vaccination in the United States. This can be traced in part to the excellent studies of Dr. Henry Kempe who has made many contributions to knowledge of smallpox and vaccination and has called attention to the question—Is the risk of smallpox in the United States today sufficient to warrant the risk of the complications of smallpox vaccination? It is pertinent to examine the salient facts. THE BACKGROUND Before the days of widespread vaccination, smallpox was epidemic in most parts of the world, with a morbidity rate of 25% and a case fatality rate of 20 to 80%, averaging 50% for variola major. Successful vaccination was introduced over 160 years ago, but the disease still persists. In the past 12 years, reported cases in the world have fallen from 500,000 to 100,000; but it is certain that many cases are not reported. Smallpox is gone from North America, Europe, Russia, and Oceania but may be reintroduced by air travelers from endemic areas much more easily than in the past when intercontinental travel time was usually longer than the incubation period of smallpox. For example, smallpox was introduced into 18 countries by travelers in the year 1956. In 1962 there were 24 deaths among 60 cases stemming from imported cases in the United Kingdom. In Europe in 1963 five cases were imported and caused a total of 140 secondary cases with 11 deaths in Sweden, Poland, Germany, Hungary, and Switzerland.


2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 821-841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mrinalini Sinha

A hundred years ago, on January 9, 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India after approximately two decades of living and working in South Africa. In 2003, the Government of India designated the day of Gandhi's return as official Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or Overseas Indian Day. The centenary of Gandhi's return was marked at this year's thirteenth annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas with appropriate official fanfare. The occasion was also observed in a wide variety of public celebrations, including a full-scale reenactment of the disembarkation from on board the S. S.Arabiaof Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, at Apollo Bunder in the Bombay Harbor; and with rallies and functions held all across India (see NDTV 2015;Outlook2015; see also Roy 2015). These centenary celebrations follow upon more than a decade-long shift in official Indian policy towards overseas Indians, or, in official parlance, Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin (see Amrute 2010; Hercog and Siegel 2013; Upadhya 2013; Varadarajan 2014). The policy, at first, was directed mainly towards attracting the wealthy in such places as the United States and the United Kingdom. Even though it now extends to the much larger labor diaspora, both old and new, settled throughout the regions of the world, the focus remains on the rich, whose investments in India are greatly coveted. The embrace of a diasporic and deterritorialized Indian imaginary—anchored, ironically, in the commemorations of Gandhi as the poster boy for the global peripatetic Indian—is a symptom of the changes in the nation-state's relationship to global capitalism in these times of accelerated globalization.


2006 ◽  
Vol 196 ◽  
pp. 4-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Weale

In the first half of this decade, the world experienced a period of low short and long-term interest rates. Shortterm rates have risen from these low levels, first in Canada and the United Kingdom, then in the United States and finally in the Euro Area. Long-term rates, by contrast, remained low, suggesting that holders of longterm debt expected the rise in short-term rates to be only temporary. Only in the past few months has the apparently anomalous pricing of long-term debt started to disappear. But with interest rates on long-term debt similar to short-term market rates internationally, the market does not yet show that the traditional upwardsloping yield curve and, on this basis, long rates remain depressed. They are also markedly below the levels of two to three years ago.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-110
Author(s):  
Maura Brighenti ◽  
Lucía Cavallero ◽  
Niccolò Cuppini ◽  
Alejo Stark

AbstractThe past few years have seen a number of “riots” – in Mexico City, Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, the United States, Argentina, France, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. What do they have in common with one another and with other popular upheavals in history? How do they differ? What do they represent as sites of protest, resistance and rebellion? This forum explores the meaning of such riots through the meaning of the term itself, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the Global South, in theory and in the words and actions of rioters and the authorities who act to suppress them. If it is true the world has entered a “new age of riots,” citizens and scholars must begin to reach some conceptual clarity of what a global riot is, and seeks to become.


Around the world, people nearing and entering retirement are holding ever-greater levels of debt than in the past. This is not a benign situation, as many pre-retirees and retirees are stressed about their indebtedness. Moreover, this growth in debt among the older population may render retirees vulnerable to financial shocks, medical care bills, and changes in interest rates. Contributors to this volume explore key aspects of the rise in debt across older cohorts, drill down into the types of debt and reasons for debt incurred by the older population, and review policies to remedy some of the financial problems facing older persons, in the United States and elsewhere. The authors explore which groups are most affected by debt, and they also identify the factors causing this important increase in leverage at older ages. It is clear that the economic and market environments are influential when it comes to saving and debt. Access to easy borrowing, low interest rates, and the rising cost of education have had important impacts on how much people borrow, and how much debt they carry at older ages. In this environment, the capacity to manage debt is ever more important as older workers lack the opportunity to recover for mistakes.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document