Search results

Considering the potential of Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) for cross-boundaries interacting and collaborating effectively, this study aims to explore the intercultural awareness of pre-service language teachers after participating in a COIL project.

Following a quantitative research approach and an exploratory cross-sectional method, the authors administered a 13-item questionnaire to unveil the perceptions of 64 future language teachers from Spain after their online experience with counterparts from the USA.

Participants consider that COIL may have enhanced their intercultural and global awareness and equipped them with valuable skills and knowledge for the future, being women more positive than men. Moreover, the results also suggest that those participants who have not traveled abroad consider COIL to be a good opportunity to compensate for the lack of knowledge or experience with other cultures resulting from not having had the opportunity to visit other countries.

COIL needs to be seen as a powerful tool to promote global learning, intercultural understanding and the development of skills among students that will be vital for success in today’s interconnected world. Nevertheless, universities and teacher training centers need to rethink the preparation of future teachers for the increasing demands to prepare students for the requirements of the global world, and to do so, they need to consider that COIL may offer them significant benefits.

This work offers an interesting exploration of teachers’ attitudes toward COIL, providing insights into the potential of online collaboration for developing intercultural awareness.

The Geography of Tourism in Spain is now at a par in terms of its scientific production with other European countries. Since the middle of the '80s the quality and volume of contributions is analogous to the rest of the European Union, although as a part of University Geography in Spain it has not achieved the level of dedication reached by other subjects considering the importance of tourist activities to the economy, the society and the territory of Spain. It could be said that the Geography of Tourism in Spain is in the international vanguard in dealing with Mediterranean coastal tourism, with the relationships between the residential real estate and tourism sectors and with aspects related to tourism and leisure in rural and protected areas.

Underground parking projects are expensive. The capital cost of underground parking projects has been, and still is, one of the promoter’s main economic concerns. Therefore, the capital cost estimation is an essential task in the early stages of underground parking projects. In this context, the promoters mainly use cost estimation models, most of them produced by methodologies with lack of precision and with low performances. Over the last years Portugal has embarked on a large programme of underground parking projects in the major cities. The present research work is based on data and knowledge colleted from that programme. This paper presents an analysis of the underground parking projects built and underway in Portugal. It discusses the main variables influencing the capital cost of under‐ground parking projects. Finally, it presents a mathematical model for estimating capital cost of this type of project during the planning phase.

The purpose of this study is to determine the beliefs that influence university students to use social networking sites (SNS) for expressive participation in social movements.

The original technology acceptance model (TAM), a quantitative methodological approach, and a survey were used to collect responses from 214 university students in Spain. Structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed relationships.

Results confirm that the perceived ease of use (PEU) and perceived usefulness (PU) of SNS significantly affect a student's intention to use SNS for expressive social participation in social movements, with use intention significantly affecting actual participation. There was no significant moderating effect of students' gender on these relationships.

Although there is much discussion in the popular press about how people use SNS, there is no published empirical research on the determinants that contribute to a person's intention to use and actual use of SNS in the context of social movements. This paper is one of the first studies to investigate young people's perception of the SNS usefulness and ease of the use for participation in social movements.

The view has been popular since the early or mid sixties that many developing countries are in the midst of “employment crises” resulting from low and stagnant demand for labour; major manifestations of this crisis are, according to this view, the rising open unemployment rates, falling participation rates, and continuing prevalence of the subtler “disguised” unemployment and underemployment. “Fixed proportion” conceptualizations of the economy and prominence of labour‐saving technical innovation contribute to the plausibility of this hypothesis. This essay questions the general validity of the “crisis” interpretation, based on data for Colombia, one of the many countries to which it has been applied. It argues

This paper aims to examine how an innovative concept was introduced to a new market segment through varied marketing techniques.

Newspapers from 1958 were reviewed to assess the impact of a chocolate company advertising campaign targeting children. The paper examines the interpretation of the campaign message and the information contained in an album of collectable cards.

Parents leave the teaching role in the hands of companies when they do not clearly understand new technologies such as nuclear energy. Companies can take advantage of what governments introduce into the market to increase their sales.

The originality of the paper lies in the examination of collectable cards as a means of researching marketing history and contributes to the study of market segmentation, particularly in the case of children, focussing on nuclear energy.

On 1 January 1929, Augusto César Sandino wrote his now famous declaration that aptly summarizes both the Sandino and the Frente Sandinista de Liberatión Nacional (FSLN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front) positions on the issue of foreign domination. He issued the statement in response to a letter from the officer commanding American forces in Nicaragua, Admiral D. F. Sellers. When Sellers suggested that Sandino's resistance would serve “no useful purpose,” Sandino replied:

The purpose of this paper is to establish analytical and numerical solutions of a navigational law to estimate displacements of hyper-static multi-legged mobile robots, which combines: monocular vision (optical flow of regional invariants) and legs dynamics.

In this study the authors propose a Euler-Lagrange equation that control legs’ joints to control robot's displacements. Robot's rotation and translational velocities are feedback by motion features of visual invariant descriptors. A general analytical solution of a derivative navigation law is proposed for hyper-static robots. The feedback is formulated with the local speed rate obtained from optical flow of visual regional invariants. The proposed formulation includes a data association algorithm aimed to correlate visual invariant descriptors detected in sequential images through monocular vision. The navigation law is constrained by a set of three kinematic equilibrium conditions for navigational scenarios: constant acceleration, constant velocity, and instantaneous acceleration.

The proposed data association method concerns local motions of multiple invariants (enhanced MSER) by minimizing the norm of multidimensional optical flow feature vectors. Kinematic measurements are used as observable arguments in the general dynamic control equation; while the legs joints dynamics model is used to formulate the controllable arguments.

The given analysis does not combine sensor data of any kind, but only monocular passive vision. The approach automatically detects environmental invariant descriptors with an enhanced version of the MSER method. Only optical flow vectors and robot's multi-leg dynamics are used to formulate descriptive rotational and translational motions for self-positioning.

The purpose of this paper is to present the process of building a model that identifies criteria that determine the quality of virtual postgraduate programs. In the Colombian context, there are no national criteria/standards to evaluate the quality of this type of program. This proposed model is implemented in a public university that has several virtual postgraduate courses within the framework of university autonomy.

This study implements a descriptive methodology through documental research based on the study of 414 documents and the analysis of 39 and research based on the design of the proposal of a quality model, its validation by experts and its application in the academic community of a public university that has virtual postgraduate courses.

The results are presented in a structure composed of 10 quality factors: coherence between programs, virtual methodology and institutional horizon; attention to students; characteristics of author teachers, virtual teachers and researchers; academic, curricular and learning processes; research, knowledge generation and production; the relationship with the environment; articulation and impact; need satisfaction and ability to generate innovation processes; internationalization, alliances and insertion in scientific and global networks; and technological resources and production of virtual contents, among others.

This model can be prospectively incorporated into processes that have adapted online training elements in health emergency contexts.

This model combines theoretical and practice aspects and the validation of experts, which contributes to the reflection on the quality of virtual programs, with criteria different from those proposed for face-to-face and distance programs.

Even though the model resulting from this inquiry responds to the situated context of a particular virtual academic program, the research perspective may be oriented to perform longitudinal studies of its implementation, as well as its adaptation to other situated contexts, including those that make use of virtual processes and means of remote education. On the other hand, it provides elements to be taken into account in the construction of educational policies on the quality of virtual programs and future research.

This paper is the result of a research project and its content is original.