Monitoring Services to Support Continuous Curriculum Engineering

Continuous and rapid developments in science and technology have raised a challenge for compliance between the learning content provided by study programs and (1) the actual state of art in the domains the programs are addressing and (2) the actual needs of companies that will employ the graduates of these programs. To achieve such compliance continuously, the digitalization of learning content (curriculum) engineering could provide supporting tools that facilitate awareness of incompliance, which is the first step in introducing changes in the learning content. In this article we discuss how such awareness, regarding the needs of companies, can be supported by a service system that monitors the gap between educational demand and offer. The proposed service system provides possibilities for automatic, semi-automatic and manual analysis of texts representing the educational demand, versus the texts representing the educational offer. The implementation of the service system has been demonstrated, having been applied at university. The experiments showed that the system can provide valuable information for educational content development, but its maintenance and incorporation in study process management and curriculum engineering still require additional research.

Visual Literacy as a Dimension of the Young Generation’s Cultural Capital – Comparative Research

The subject of the research presented in the article, related to visual literacy, is to determine the scope and quality of the phenomenon of communication in the area of symbolic communication. Individual dispositions of information users were taken into account, creating a set of behaviors and reactions, views and concepts, personal beliefs and inclinations that determine the way of life and thinking – the so-called Habitus by Pierre Bourdieu. The aim was to create the characteristics of the examined representatives of the young generation and to determine their predispositions to symbolize (search for references). The research was carried out on two comparative groups of research participants from Poland and Italy in order to examine the quality of contemporary visual communication and the predisposition of information users to visualization, and their adaptation to the visual form of expression. The research meets the educational demand for a modern form of education, taking into account the modern informational live environment and media immersion in the visual reality of the participants of the education process.

Administrative Challenges

Business led the e-learning development in the 1990s, capturing the market. Public universities watched and wrote papers. It took 15 years for the non-profits to recapture the market. The next online market is global. Borderless online degrees are needed in Africa, Asia, and South America to supply industry with skilled workers. The problem is that many of the countries cannot afford to build the campuses that will be required. One solution is low-cost borderless online degrees that quality graduates for jobs in industry and further education. The degrees generate income for the providers. The degrees also provide a public benefit for the receiving nations that cannot meet the educational demand. This chapter discusses the administrative approaches that will be used to infuse a business mentality within public education without destroying the sense of public service.

Global Crisis in Higher Education

Postsecondary education faces underfunding increased competition and governmental pressure to improve student success. At the same time, many nations cannot meet their educational demand for greater access to higher education. This chapter introduces the national and global threats caused by being unable to train workers for the changing job market. The discussion outlines the need and how borderless online degrees can be a solution. Learning has changed. Today, the process may begin with the first tweet at breakfast, followed by blogging, texting, social media, and responses in the course learning management system. Students may assemble on Skype to work in teams. Borderless online degrees can be an inexpensive approach to make educations more accessible and to promote economic growth.

Getting a Child through Secondary School and to College in India

In the classic formulations of social capital theory, families employ their social capital resources to enhance other capitals, in particular their human capital investments. Social capital would seem to be especially important in the case of India, where, in recent years, higher education has been under considerable stress with rising educational demand, inadequate supply, and little parental experience to guide children's transition through the education system. We use the 2005 and 2012 waves of the nationally representative India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to show how relatively high-status connections advantage some families' chances of their children reaching educational milestones such as secondary school completion and college entry. The 2005 IHDS survey measure of a household's formal sector contacts in education, government, and health predicts their children's educational achievements by the second wave, seven years later, controlling for households' and children's initial backgrounds.