Cooperative education during Covid-19 pandemic: enhancing legal rights and professional development of interns in Thailand

Purpose The study aims at enriching the existing cooperative education sector in Thailand. Adequate cooperative education has direct impacts upon graduates’ future professional development, employability and enhanced professional skills. The cooperative education framework in Thailand is relatively a recent concept and lacks detailed research. Design/methodology/approach The methodology adopted in this study is mixed-method, inclusive of qualitative methodology where data were collected through key informant interviews and; quantitative methodology involving survey questionnaires with a sample of 350 respondents. The data analysis included the quantitative analysis with Chi-square and excerpts from the key informant interview respondents. Additional strength, weakness, opportunity and threat analysis is performed to provide for gaps at various levels of cooperative education and the potential opportunities to the graduates in Thailand. Findings The findings depict a lack of legal framework for effective skill development, uncertain moral and physical security of the interns and absence of legal rights for interns, minimal support and assistance from the government sector, reduced future employability and insufficient financial resources among poorer students. Research limitations/implications Lack of student and cooperative database with the government departments. Practical implications The Thai Qualification Framework has been adopted in a majority of universities, however, the quality assurance does not cover the student’s perspectives, financial and social limitations towards attending the cooperative education. Social implications With enhanced vulnerabilities due to the Covid-19 pandemic, adverse impacts are analysed and recommendations are provided for enhancing cooperative education opportunities towards students. Originality/value This research aims to understand the perspectives of the students who graduated with cooperative education and are currently working professionals.

Research on the Teaching of Landscape Engineering by Foreign Teachers in Sino-Foreign Cooperative Education in SUCC

Sino-foreign cooperative education plays an important role in undergraduate education. It has also proved itself popular in higher vocational education in recent years, in which foreign teachers are undertaking the task of teaching some specialized courses. The teaching by foreign teachers has certain irreplaceable advantages, but nonnegligible disadvantages as well. Questionnaires have been distributed to the students majoring in Landscape Engineering from Shanghai Urban Construction College to investigate the teaching of specialized courses by foreign teachers. Based on the statistics, the advantages and disadvantages of their teaching have been analyzed, and several suggestions on how to adopt the good points and avoid the shortcomings are offered, so as to improve the quality of Sino-foreign cooperative education in higher vocational college.

Einaudi and Cooperative Education Association (MCE). Traces of a project for the elementary school (1966-67)

The aim of this paper is to show the editorial relationship between the Einaudi publishing house and the Cooperative Education Association (MCE) during the second half of the Sixties. The members of the Association were looking for an editor willing to spread their pedagogical instances for the renewal of the Italian school and they found it in Einaudi. Thanks to the study of the correspondence and the documentation preserved in the Giulio Einaudi Editore Historical Archive, it has been possible to analyze a project of textbooks for the elementary school, made in collaboration with relevant members of the Association such as Gianni Rodari, Mario Lodi, Giuseppe Tamagnini and Bruno Ciari. The collections were never published, in part for financial reasons, but also because of the rising debate around the textbooks. The opinion of the Association in the late Sixties was changed: the point was not to renew the textbooks but to abolish them. Understanding the reasons of the end of this project might help to clarify the pedagogical impact of the cultural and social changes of that period, the relationship between education and politics. Moreover, it is not by chance that from the ashes of this project took shape The wrong country (Il paese sbagliato), a masterpiece written by Mario Lodi destined to become a classic for the history of education.

Design of Educational Learning Management Cloud Process with Blockchain 4.0 based E-Portfolio

The development of technology in education has produced many innovations to support the learning process. The large variety of learning media is the digital competence of education, which is very much needed in higher education . However, from several universities, there are still many that do not have adequate digital competence. This study uses a survey method that will be calculated quantitatively through a Likert Scale calculation. The design of this cooperative education management system uses E-Portfolio Integration stored in cloud computing based on Blockchain technology. The Blockchain process will be helpful as a literary platform for researchers who will start research on Blockchain technology for digital education so that the results of digital competence cannot be taken over by third parties and are transparent, and this is the solution to the problems in this research. Based on the study results, it can be seen that the Student-Centered iLearning Blockchain (SCi-B) with E-Portfolio is supported by Blockchain technology that can meet the needs of universities and improve cooperative education on digital competence.

Effectiveness of Work-Integrated Learning Partnerships: Case Study of Cooperative Education in Agricultural Tertiary Education

The growing demand for promoting the role of higher education institutions in sustainability has contributed to creating new partnerships with other actors. In the field of education, the formation of cooperative education (co-op) partnerships was adopted as a strategy for work-integrated learning in cooperation with industry. This study investigated the effectiveness of co-op partnerships and the factors that influence them in the context of tertiary agriculture education in Saudi Arabia. A random sample of 130 co-op students was selected within the Bachelor of Agricultural Sciences delivered by the College of Food and Agriculture Sciences at King Saud University. The satisfaction level of students was explored in terms of four main areas, namely, the quality of the program design, organizational climate, personal and professional qualities, and program learning outcomes. The majority of students (70%) were highly satisfied with the quality of the program design, while they had a moderate level of satisfaction regarding the organizational climate of the co-op program (74.6%). Furthermore, 85.4% of students were highly satisfied regarding the learning outcomes they gained. The results also revealed that there were significant positive relationships between the level of satisfaction of students regarding program learning outcomes and their quality assessments of the program design, personal and professional qualities, and organizational climate. The measurement scale used in this study may assist in assessing the sustainability of co-op partnerships. Moreover, understanding the satisfaction level of students can help to identify areas that should be improved and, in turn, contribute to improving the governance and sustainability of co-op partnerships for all stakeholders.

On the Cooperative Education Mechanism of Ideological and Political Education in Colleges and Universities from the Perspective of Synergy

Ideological and political education in colleges and universities is a complex system, which needs to strengthen mutual cooperation among subsystems with the help of synergetic theory to make the internal state of system from disorder to order, from independence to relevance, so as to achieve the effect of cooperative education. In order to promote the in-depth combination of synergetic theory with ideological and political education in colleges and universities and to enhance synergy level, it is necessary to strengthen and improve the construction of synergetic education mechanism, and empower the construction of political and ideological synergetic education with a sound synergetic mechanism.

The Transformation of the Teaching Mode of German Course Based on Corpus — Taking the Sino-German Joint Education Cooperation in Qilu University of Technology (SDAS) as an Example

Taking the Sino-German cooperative education project in mechanical and automotive engineering major of Qilu University of Technology (SDAS) for example, this paper mainly introduces the changes of teaching mode of German courses based on the corpus. The transformation of the teaching mode consists of both teaching methods and teaching contents. The teaching method has changed from teacher-teaching method to a hybrid method of "student self-exploration + group discussion + teacher guidance", and the teaching content has changed from "German" learning to "German +" learning. Changes above are shown and supported by project curriculum examples, which in turn demonstrate the role of corpus in foreign language teaching.