scholarly journals Leveraging AI and Machine Learning for National Student Survey: Actionable Insights from Textual Feedback to Enhance Quality of Teaching and Learning in UK’s Higher Education

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 514
Author(s):  
Raheel Nawaz ◽  
Quanbin Sun ◽  
Matthew Shardlow ◽  
Georgios Kontonatsios ◽  
Naif R. Aljohani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Likert Scale ◽  
Supervised Machine Learning ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Student Survey ◽  
Quality Of Teaching

Students’ evaluation of teaching, for instance, through feedback surveys, constitutes an integral mechanism for quality assurance and enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education. These surveys usually comprise both the Likert scale and free-text responses. Since the discrete Likert scale responses are easy to analyze, they feature more prominently in survey analyses. However, the free-text responses often contain richer, detailed, and nuanced information with actionable insights. Mining these insights is more challenging, as it requires a higher degree of processing by human experts, making the process time-consuming and resource intensive. Consequently, the free-text analyses are often restricted in scale, scope, and impact. To address these issues, we propose a novel automated analysis framework for extracting actionable information from free-text responses to open-ended questions in student feedback questionnaires. By leveraging state-of-the-art supervised machine learning techniques and unsupervised clustering methods, we implemented our framework as a case study to analyze a large-scale dataset of 4400 open-ended responses to the National Student Survey (NSS) at a UK university. These analyses then led to the identification, design, implementation, and evaluation of a series of teaching and learning interventions over a two-year period. The highly encouraging results demonstrate our approach’s validity and broad (national and international) application potential—covering tertiary education, commercial training, and apprenticeship programs, etc., where textual feedback is collected to enhance the quality of teaching and learning.

scholarly journals Characteristics of Online Learning in Higher Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-155
Author(s):  
Diana-Crina Marin ◽  
Mușata Bocoș
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Online Learning ◽  
Time Management ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Quality Of Teaching ◽  
Teaching Learning ◽  
Students Success

"In the context in which the teaching, learning, and assessment processes take place in the online environment, the question arises whether the currently organized learning situations are as effective as the learning situations carried out in the classroom, before the beginning of the pandemic. One of the disadvantages of online learning is related to the teacher’s low control over students’ activity. Factors such as initiative, creativity, efficient time management, intrinsic motivation, responsibility, and intellectual curiosity play an important role in students’ success in learning activities. Attendance at courses should not be formal and superficial and should be a process that involves the active and interactive participation of the students in the learning process. Providing high-quality educational opportunities to all students is a goal that is increasingly difficult to achieve in the context of the absence of face-to-face interactions. Also, applying a curriculum focused on the needs of the learner is becoming hard to achieve. Through this research, we aim to investigate issues related to how online learning takes place and to establish ways in which we can increase the efficiency of current teaching and learning processes. The study revealed that in the opinion of most of the students, the current epidemiological context has influenced in a negative way the quality of teaching and the student-teacher educational relationship. Keywords: Interactive learning, eLearning, independence in learning, higher education, efficient strategies "

scholarly journals Lecturers’ Perceptions on Challenges and Expectations on Work Conditions: Case of Zimbabwe Rural State University

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Munyaradzi Chidarikire
Keyword(s):  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
Highly Qualified ◽  
Quality Of Teaching ◽  
Education Data ◽  
University Lecturers

This qualitative paper explored the Zimbabwe rural university lecturers’ experiences, challenges, and expectations in the execution of their duties, as they are highly de-motivated. The Zimbabwe Higher and Tertiary Education 5.0 thrust states the roles of universities as consisting of five critical issues: Teaching, Research, Community Engagement, Innovation, and Industrialization have been greatly affected by challenges cited in this article. There is a dearth of literature on the challenges faced by and there is a lack of solutions propagated by lecturers in universities located in rural areas in Zimbabwe. The quality of teaching and learning outcomes in Zimbabwe universities have been deteriorating due to financial, high workload among others. Hence, there is a need to engage in this study to find university lecturers’ views on how these challenges should be addressed to enhance the quality of teaching and learning outcomes. Abraham Maslow’s theoretical framework and narrative paradigm were used in this paper. A purposive sample was used to select nine knowledge-rich university lecturers from Faculty of Education. Data was generated through focus group discussions and content thematic analysis was used to analyze data. The participants responded to two critical questions: ‘what are the challenges faced by rural university lecturers and what should be done to mitigate challenges affecting lecturers in rural areas?’ This article found that highly qualified university lecturers in Zimbabwe are leaving rural universities to international universities seeking greener pastures. Therefore, the paper recommended that Zimbabwe university lecturers should receive salaries and other benefits at par with international universities.

Modern University Education: Administrative and Bureaucratic Pressures and Their Consequences

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4-1) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Andrey Ivanov ◽  
◽  
Irina Fotieva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Online Teaching ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
University Education ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Quality Of Teaching ◽  
Russian Higher Education

The article considers two interrelated problems of modern Russian higher education: the strengthening of administrative coercion and control as well as the introduction of distance education. As a theoretical and methodological basis of the study, the authors rely on the socio-philosophical analysis of the problems of education in the famous S.I. Hessen’s work, where three basic principles of the effective functioning of the university are highlighted: the completeness of scientific knowledge, the freedom of teaching and learning, and self-government. The authors substantiate the view that at present all these principles are violated. Violation of the first of them is manifested in a decrease in hours devoted to the teaching of fundamental disciplines and in a general orientation toward the graduation of a “narrow” specialist; the second principle is incompatible with the extremely increased reporting of universities and overly formalized indicators of the quality of their work. Violation of the third principle is manifested in the gradual elimination of university autonomy, in particular, free election of rectors. The most negative manifestation of administrative pressure, according to the authors, today is the forced introduction of distance learning. The authors critically analyze the main arguments put forward in favor of this project: saving university budgets, ensuring a higher quality of teaching, the need to follow the general logic of modernization of education as a whole. The solution to financial problems, according to the authors, should not be based on forced economy, but on the competent organization of the country’s economic life. An appeal to a higher quality of teaching, which, it is argued, must be provided by teachers from the country’s central universities, is based on biased and unproven ideas. In addition, for mastering critical and systematic thinking skills, conducting scientific discussions, direct communication between teachers and students is necessary, which is not feasible in the conditions of online teaching with a very large number of students. In addition, the authors highlight the idea that nobody takes into account the need for close knowledge of a particular audience by a teacher to choose an adequate style of lecturing or conducting practical classes. The article concludes that the current administrative-bureaucratic style of managing higher education, in which not only the basic principles of the successful functioning of the latter are violated, but also destructive reforms are carried out, is destructive not only for education as such, but also for the state itself.

'A place where open minds meet': The constraints of alignment and the effects of compulsory teacher training on teaching and learning in higher education

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 14-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulina Mihailova
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Teacher Training ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Quality Of Teaching ◽  
Academic Practices ◽  
Disciplinary Expertise ◽  
University Lecturers ◽  
The University ◽  
Shed Light

The article investigates how university lecturers taking part in the compulsory teacher training at Stockholm University (SU) conceive of the effects of standardised and formalised training on their teaching. The study explores the emotions and responses evoked among academics when everyone is required to embrace the same pedagogic philosophy of constructive alignment (Biggs 2003), adopt the language of learning outcomes and assign the same standards to diverse academic practices. The article attempts to shed light on different conceptions of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education and the interplay between the lecturers' values of academic freedom, collegiality and disciplinary expertise and the university leadership's values of efficiency, accountability and measurability of performance. The article considers how these conceptions coexist and are negotiated within the university as an organisation.

Debate as a learning activity for teaching programming: a case in the subject of machine learning

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Uma Gunasilan
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Learning Styles ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Learning Activity ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Emerging Issues

PurposeDebates are well known to encompass a variety of skills we would like higher education candidates to embody when they graduate.Design/methodology/approachDebates in a classroom with computer science as the main subject has been popular in high schools particularly with emerging issues around the area, however it does not have as an extensive similar documented outreach in tertiary education, particularly in the area of hard computer sciences and more recent concentrations of computer science, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing.FindingsTo explore further, the debate dataset had more methodologies applied and was split into training and testing sets, whose results were then compared by a standardized measure: Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) which is currently standard in the industry. The rationale of the approach is to quantify that debate activities have an immensely positive impact towards both the teaching and learning in technical subjects and needs to be more often and robustly used within higher education.Originality/valueThe rationale of the approach is that classroom debate activities equip students with verbal and social learning styles and an opportunity to engage with content in a way that is more comfortable than working with traditional lecture-and-laboratory style learning.

ZPD Incidence Development Strategy for Demand of Internet in Life-Science Teaching of Comprehensive Regional Higher Education Institutes

2011 ◽  
Vol 267 ◽  
pp. 918-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Ming Li
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Science Teaching ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Quality Of Teaching ◽  
Regional University ◽  
Learning Issues ◽  
Proper Strategy

Many regional higher education institutes (mainly be regional university) have been founded from 1998 in China. From 2006, most of those regional higher education institutes promoted to be comprehensive regional higher education institutes (CRHEIs) in succession. Students in those CRHEIs become more and more, and the quality of teaching should be improved. In this paper, we analyses internet–based teaching and learning issues at CRHEIs level and comprehensive nationwide higher education institutes (CNHEIs) level. We get that internet integration in CRHE need to be in lined with proper strategy.

Developing the Total Student: Model for Learners as Partners in Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Chris Eriye Tralagba ◽  
Abasiama G. Akpan
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Student Development ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
University Education ◽  
Tertiary Institutions ◽  
Quality Of Higher Education ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Key Skills

In addition to influencing students’ knowledge base, thinking abilities and skills; university education offers the opportunity to promote other aspects of students’ growth as people. University education has an important role in shaping our future society because today’s university students will be tomorrow’s doctors, engineers, business managers, teachers, faith leaders, politicians, citizens, activists, parents and neighbours. While they need to be able to demonstrate key skills and knowledge to enact those roles effectively, they must also demonstrate personal and social responsibility in carrying them out. While much of the current political discourse about higher education is instrumental and economic, this paper aims to lay the foundation for a discourse based on student development. Data was collected through focus group discussions with students in the various colleges in Evangel University, Akaeze - Nigeria, in-depth interviews with lecturers, administrative staff and document analyses of conference papers and journal articles. Findings reveal that the quality of tertiary education is influenced by socio–cultural, academic, economic, policy, political and administrative factors all of which are inextricably interwoven. In this case, the argument is for leadership of teaching and learning for the purpose of promoting students’ holistic development. The discussion of the findings is based on the findings on a wide range of related literature on learners’ challenges in other universities in Nigeria. The paper concludes that the quality of higher education in tertiary institutions is influenced by factors that have their roots in commercialization, general funding, and human population growth. It was recommended that appropriate policies and indigenous professionals (both academic and administrative) are necessary for improving the quality of higher education in tertiary institutions.

scholarly journals How Do Quality of Teaching, Assessment, and Feedback Drive Undergraduate Course Satisfaction in U.K. Business Schools? A Comparative Analysis With Nonbusiness School Courses Using the U.K. National Student Survey

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 618-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan Sutherland ◽  
Philip Warwick ◽  
John Anderson ◽  
Mark Learmonth
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Student Satisfaction ◽  
Instrumental Learning ◽  
Teaching Quality ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Intellectual Stimulation ◽  
Student Survey ◽  
Teaching Assessment ◽  
Quality Of Teaching

How does quality of teaching, assessment, and feedback influence satisfaction with overall course quality for students taking business school (BS) undergraduate courses in the United Kingdom? Are these teaching-related determinants of satisfaction in BS courses different to those in nonbusiness school (NBS) courses? These questions currently figure prominently in U.K. higher education owing to the introduction of a “Teaching Excellence Framework,” linking student fee increases to levels of reported student satisfaction. The elevation of student satisfaction as a determinant of higher education delivery raises important questions about the possible longer term consequences for teaching practices. To explore these, we test three sets of hypotheses relating to how teaching, assessment, and feedback quality affects satisfaction in the BS context, as well as comparative differences (i.e., BS vs. NBS students). We draw from over 1 million responses recorded in the U.K.’s National Student Survey. We find questions related to perceived teaching quality are important satisfaction drivers for BS students. In terms of differences with NBS students, we find intellectual stimulation appears of lesser importance to BS students, whereas fair assessments are of greater importance. BS students, we argue, exhibit a stronger orientation toward “instrumental” learning. We consider policy implications.

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