How to support mobility students to gain soft-competences: Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes

Students participating in mobility experiences have a great learning opportunity, but in many cases they hardly realise about the soft-competences they developed during mobility. In this context, the supporting role of universities is key for students to make the most of their mobility and be able to communicate their learning outcomes. This study analyses the support services that students receive for the development and acknolwledgement of mobility soft comptencies (related with the three dimensiones: knowledge, skills and attitudes or KSAs) in order to define the university strategy in this field. Results show two types of support for outgoing and incoming students: (i) passive initiatives based on delivering relevant information for the mobility period to students; and (ii) active initiatives based on training activities and activities for student integration in the host university/city/culture. No support initiatives on mobility related KSAs for returned students or academic staff have been identified.

Faculty management after higher education reforms – exploring the organizational structure of faculties considering their context factors

With the implementation of the new steering model (NSM), universities should align themselves more closely with management principles. Especially, the heads of faculties must cope with higher demands of management tasks. As a result, more management positions are established and organizational structures are changed. To shed light on how structures change, we investigate the faculties of one comprehensive and one technical university within Germany – which are similar in many factors – using the contingency approach. Information about context factors and the number and type of established positions is gained from a systematic analysis of their homepages. Dimensions of the organizational structure are used to interpret the results. Our comparison shows that the technical university, which has established itself as an entrepreneurial university, orients its organizational structure more towards the NSM than the comprehensive university, which is reflected by more support positions in faculty management. Thus, the profile and type of the university seem to be crucial context factors, while our study revealed that the number of students of the faculties and the number or type of degree programs are less crucial context factors.

The faculty development model of University of Milan-Bicocca: towards an integration of general and disciplinary didactics

The contribution presents the faculty development program of the University of Milano-Bicocca, called “Teaching large classes”. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the training structure of this project (launched in 2016 with a series of pilot actions that became fully operational the following year) and its recent developments. The paper intends to provide a detailed description of the three main principle that shape the structure of the training program: the continuum of immersion and distancing in training methodologies; the isomorphism between learning contents and teaching methodologies; the focus on the didactic transposition and education reconstruction process. The analysis of these principles shows that the inter- and trans-disciplinary approach of the training program is a crucial condition to the interconnectedness of the three principles in a consistent training structure. Furthermore, the multi- inter- and transdisciplinary approach allows for the development of the project with a broader scope.

Sustainable Practices in research-integrated Education in HE: towards an accepted Development Pedagogy

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in UK Higher Education Institutions excellent is the new good. With HEIs striving to achieve ‘excellence in teaching’ in order to attract the best students, questions are being asked about how to measure excellence and about whether or not lecturers are supported in doing so. How can lecturers devise reliable measures for evaluating the quality of their teaching? The following piece conceptualises the relationship between education research and practice in HE through discussing the sustainable integration of education research into teaching practice. The overarching aim is to discuss the potential for a pedagogy centred on the development of action research in educator development programmes and thus gauge how sustainable such practices can be in HE.

Relationships Between External Factors and University Students' Attitudes towards Academic Research

Research is an important part of an academic career, yet it is not always frequently practiced by most students. This descriptive-correlational research aimed to find out the external factors that influence students’ attitudes toward research. We sampled 201 undergraduates at Wenzhou-Kean University and analyzed their responses to the questionnaire in order to determine the relationship between possible factors and their attitudes. The results revealed that the external factor of the training environment has a moderate positive influence on research attitude, while support from the university has a strong positive influence on research attitude. Specifically, factors of faculty support, curriculum design, on-campus academic activities, library service, and financial support all moderately influence students’ attitudes towards research in a positive way. The most salient influential factor of all is faculty support. The results suggested that to improve students’ attitudes towards research, sufficient support is vital, especially academic and financial support. Therefore, to externally encourage students to conduct academic research, faculty and university could give more consideration to support provision.

Correlation between students’ workload and attendance as related towards final grades: A case of study on Statistics for first-year Engineering students.

In this work, a monitoring experience of student workload and attendance is presented. During four academic years, from 2015 until 2019, first-year students of an Engineering degree have been asked, three times a week, to estimate their autonomous workload devoted to the Statistics subject. The monitoring strategy has been anonymous, open and voluntary and has shown a high ratio of participation: 407 students out of 433. To generate the final dataset this information has been combined with attending records to classroom-based lectures and final grades achieved. Results indicate that declared student’s workload hardly reaches the 90 hours of autonomous work established in the ECTS ratio of our university. Nonparametric comparisons show strong statistical evidences of the relationship between final grades in the subject and declared workload and attendance. We find that attendance is crucial in order to achieve a homogeneous workload along the semester and a success in the subject’s grading.

Creativity and Innovation Skills in University STEM Education: The CHET Project Approach

Creativity and innovation are crucial skills to face challenges in economy, environment and social context today, especially next decade with 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all United Nations Member States. European Higher Education System considers STEM studies play a key role to lead the global labor market and address our economic system towards more sustainability and equality model. Innovative educational projects developed at the Universidad Politécinca de Madrid have identified lack of students skills in creativity and innovation to apply challenge based-learning and others methodologies in classrooms. Hovewer Higher Education institutions need a whole approach to include creativity in university curricula (graduate and postgraduate programs), at the same time, professors claim support to embebed innovative methodologies in their subjects. CHET Project is designed as a solid strategy aimed at developing an innovative process to modernization of Higher Education System in Europe. Step by step, the project begins by defining the learning environment, then developing creativity techniques and tools, and finally validating methodologies and processes. All this supported by free access online platform.

Do text discussions improve the academic skills of students of HE? Andorra University case.

Reading is a core competency in learning processes of higher education as a tool for accessing discipline-specific knowledge. The aim of this case study is to analyse the impact of text group discussions on the academic skills of students at the Universitat d’Andorra (UdA). Qualitative techniques -non-participant observation, interviews and discussion groups- were applied to UdA students and faculty. Five student groups belonging to the Bachelor of Teaching and Learning (BTL), Bachelor of Computer Science (BCS) and Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) were studied. After processing the data with Atlas.ti, the first results were obtained. Evidences of a positive impact on the academic skills are identified. Firstly, both students and faculty indicated an improvement of the text comprehension mainly because of the peer interactions. Improvement of the critical and analitycal attitude, the own speech as well as the metacognitive learning are also highlighted as areas on which dialogic reading has positive impact.

Planned Chaos in Electrical Engineering Education

This paper presents the idea to intentionally introduce planned chaos into electrical engineering lectures and lab courses to improve students’ learning success. The reason to present this idea are several personal experiences in daily teaching. If students experience some uncertainty in their study program, it is seen that they have higher challenges and therefore higher learning success in managing uncertain situations. In these ways, students acquire methodical and social competences to deal with uncertainty and achieve productive results in an unstable working environment. If, however, the chaos is too large, students are over-strained with the situation, distracted from the actual learning targets and consequently learning results will be worse, drop-out rates will increase and they will be frustrated. The beneficial level of uncertainty depends on the student culture, academic progress and personality characteristics. The competence to deal with complex situations is essential for later professional life where unexpected circumstances occur regularly. Introducing planned chaos into lectures and lab courses has not to be confused with a missing didactic concept and is no justification for a bad preparation. Planned chaos is a demanding concept for professors to find the right implementation for an optimized learning outcome. These described findings are experienced from practical work and student evaluations.