“There’s So Much That We’re Doing”: How Florida College System Institutions Address Basic Needs Insecurity Among Students

Research Question: A sizable portion of college students experience food and housing insecurity, which poses a roadblock to fully and successfully engaging in higher education. In light of these complex challenges, we ask: How do Florida College System (FCS) institutions meet the basic needs of their students? Methods: To answer the question at hand, we conducted an embedded single case study of the FCS. Between 2014 and 2019, researchers traveled to 21 Florida colleges on one or more occasions to speak with college presidents, administrators, faculty members, advisors, academic support staff, and students. In total, we gathered data from 1,379 people through 213 focus group sessions and 20 individual interviews. Results: From these data emerged evidence of the extensive services and support programs provided by FCS institutions, ranging from food and housing assistance to clothing, transportation, and childcare. Such initiatives aim to meet the chronic, daily needs of students and their families, as well as acute needs that arise out of local disasters and crises. Contributions: The findings of this study contribute to the literature on the mission of community colleges. While these support programs address needs traditionally considered non-academic, participants suggest that they are essential to fostering student success. By meeting students’ physiological and safety needs, institutions can better accomplish their academic goals of remediation, transfer, vocational training, and contract education, particularly among students who have been traditionally excluded from higher education. The findings also highlight the importance of acknowledging the needs of students’ families when providing support.

The Contract Education as a Goal-oriented System of Activity

The aim of the work is an application of the theory of Goal-oriented System of Activity to analysis and organization of effective contract targeted training at higher education institutions. The organization of targeted training of specialists is considered as one of the components of public administration to address staff problems in various regions and sectors of the economy in the context of rapidly changing demands of society, to implement promising youth policy and mitigate demographic problems. An algorithmic chain of meaningful actions is con structed on the basis of the methodology of the Goal-oriented System of Activity, which takes into account the real state of human, intellectual, material and economic resources and enables to minimize existing contradictions and, accordingly, ensure the establishment of partnerships between all interested participants in the process of targeted training (government agencies, employers, higher education institutions and students). As an example, four stages of contract teacher training have been considered.

Student active learning in net based education

During 2018 the Anna Lindh Library at the Swedish Defence University (SEDU) offers all information literacy education online. The transformation to online teaching has a number of reasons and here are some: • The number of students is expected to grow with 30 % within the next two years. Classes will be larger and there is a scarcity of physical classrooms on the horizon. • Military contract education students have expressed wishes for more flexible learning.• The Swedish University Computer Network (SUNET) provides infrastructure and software services, hence SEDU has adequate technological environment. As a first step in the transition to net based education, we have used the web conferencing software Adobe Connect to carry out the teaching. The teaching has been scheduled and synchronous. We have designed it with search exercises, conducted individually or in groups to stimulate student-active learning. Synchronous design like this may also have social advantages, according to Biggs. (Biggs, 2011, p. 71). In addition to Adobe Connect, the school's Learning Management System has been used as a synchronous communication platform with the students. According to Hrastinski technology, if properly used, it can increase learning opportunities. (Hrastinski, 2013, p.15). We also believe that online education can be a solution when the student groups grow. It enables remote teaching and it is in close proximity to the platforms and databases used in today's information search. One of the challenges of applying net based learning to information literacy instruction is that the students are not familiar to the technique yet. Another challenge is that librarians do not meet the same students over a longer period of time, or not even when they need the instruction the most. Therefore the combination of scheduled synchronous instruction and asynchronous communication will possibly turn out to be the most successful. ReferencesHrastinski, S. (2013). Nätbaserad utbildning: En introduktion (2. ed.). Lund: Studentlitteratur. Biggs, J. & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student does (4. rev. ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.Delaney, Geraldine, & Bates, Jessica. (2018). How Can the University Library Better Meet the Information Needs of Research Students? Experiences from Ulster University. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 24(1), 63-89.

How green was my valley

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the wage distribution in Spain, its evolution in recent years and the implications for increased wage dispersion. Accordingly, its attention focuses on the following issues: first, the paper investigates how personal, job and firm attributes affect the wages distribution and examine earnings differentials between and within groups of workers according to their individual and job characteristics throughout the conditional wage distribution; and second, the paper analyses whether the business cycle may influence the magnitude of these differentials. Design/methodology/approach – Using administrative data from the Spanish Social Security and the Tax Administration National Agency, the paper estimates OLS and quantile regression (QR) models in order to assess the impact of personal, job and workplace attributes on between- and within-groups wage inequality. Findings – Among other things, we find that, although the average wage has been increasing over time (until 2009), changes have not been uniform across the earnings distribution, making the dispersion fall during boom years but rise during downturn years. Furthermore, changes in the impacts of some characteristics (types of contract, education/qualifications, region and employer size) contributed to higher wage dispersion, while others (tenure) made the distribution more equal. Originality/value – The analysis of the paper in novel in that it investigates whether wage differentials respond to the business cycle and what the source of that variation is. Moreover, it analyses wages differentials not only at the mean but also throughout the conditional earnings distribution, making it possible to assess the impact of these attributes on between- and within-groups wage inequality.