MOOCs-The way to go

MOOCs plays a vital role in transforming higher education across the globe. Today, providing an access to higher education to people of all sectors is the highest priority in all the developed and developing countries. Currently many universities in developed countries are able to get to the top rankings (by various agencies) because of their high education standards, flexibility in the education system, curriculum and outreach programmes. By this they are able to attract the best brains from across the globe. MOOCs helps them to attain this to a greater extent apart from the policy matters. In this paper, cumulative data of three consecutive years of a NPTEL local chapter and of courses in Coursera taken during the peak pandemic duration is taken in to consideration for the analysis of trends and popularity of MOOCs among students and faculty fraternity in a technical institution.

Teaching Python for Data Science: Collaborative development of a modular & interactive curriculum

We are bioinformatics trainees at the University of Michigan who started a local chapter of Girls Who Code to provide a fun and supportive environment for high school women to learn the power of coding. Our goal was to cover basic coding topics and data science concepts through live coding and hands-on practice. However, we could not find a resource that exactly met our needs. Therefore, over the past three years, we have developed a curriculum and instructional format using Jupyter notebooks to effectively teach introductory Python for data science. This method, inspired by The Carpentries organization, uses bite-sized lessons followed by independent practice time to reinforce coding concepts, and culminates in a data science capstone project using real-world data. We believe our open curriculum is a valuable resource to the wider education community and hope that educators will use and improve our lessons, practice problems, and teaching best practices. Anyone can contribute to our educational material on GitHub (https://github.com/GWC-DCMB).

Leadership in Social Movements: Evidence from the “Forty-Eighters” in the Civil War

This paper studies the role of leaders in the social movement against slavery that culminated in the US Civil War. Our analysis is organized around a natural experiment: leaders of the failed German revolution of 1848–1849 were expelled to the United States and became antislavery campaigners who helped mobilize Union Army volunteers. Towns where Forty-Eighters settled show two-thirds higher Union Army enlistments. Their influence worked through local newspapers and social clubs. Going beyond enlistment decisions, Forty-Eighters reduced their companies’ desertion rate during the war. In the long run, Forty-Eighter towns were more likely to form a local chapter of the NAACP. (JEL D74, J15, J45, J61, N31, N41)

Religious Gift-Giving Turned Upside Down. On Monks and Punks in Myanmar

In Myanmar, a mainly Buddhist country, gift-giving practices are part of the everyday life. An established practice is dāna, where laypeople support those living a monastic life. Turning this established practice on its head is used as a tool of socio-political protest by a group of punks, who run the local chapter of Food Not Bombs in Yangon. The punks’' protest is contextualized through the local nexus of religion and politics, within which dāna practices occupy a central role.

Programmatic Involvement and Emerging Educational Outcomes: An Exploratory Study

Preparing students in school-based agricultural education (SBAE) to respond to emerging challenges impacting – and being impacted by – agriculture, food, and natural resource systems (e.g., climate change, water scarcity, soil degradation) is essential. Therefore, student involvement in SBAE was investigated in relation to metacognition, problem-solving abilities, and systems thinking, three educational outcomes deemed "emerging" due to their necessity in addressing complex problems. Overall, results from this investigation suggest involvement in SBAE is related to higher levels of metacognition, problem-solving ability, and systems thinking when compared to no involvement. However, when comparing more advanced levels of involvement (e. g., participating in state or national level FFA contests) to foundational involvement (e.g., participating in local/chapter level FFA contests), advanced involvement did not consistently relate to increased attainment of the emerging educational outcomes. In congruence with the Theory of Student Involvement, recommendations for practice and research are highlighted. Principal among the recommendations is a call for educators to invest resources to encourage a broader range of students to be involved in SBAE at more foundational levels rather than investing resources in the advanced involvement of a select few students.

A Living Wage in Long Beach

This chapter describes a campaign to raise the minimum wage for hotel workers in Long Beach, California, exploring the deft use of the social change matrix to address income inequality in a way that was adapted to local conditions. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) studied the tourism industry in Long Beach and highlighted both the role of tax breaks for this industry in the community as well as the low wages paid to workers in it. Teaming up with a local chapter of UNITE HERE Local 11—the union that represents workers in the hotel, food service, and gaming industries—LAANE began to advocate for higher wages for employees in hotels in Long Beach. The UNITE HERE–LAANE partnership did not do much in terms of social media to promote its message, although it had a Facebook page and used Twitter and other channels. Instead, it used the mails and, most important, the face-to-face, door-to-door canvassing to get its message out.