Search results

The paper aims to make the case that attention to student learning outcomes provides a pedagogical bridge between the expectations of community college faculty and the performance of underprepared students.

Critical examination of research studies in the professional literature and examination of the work of Bob Barr and John Tagg, as well as of Paulo Freire presents a model in which students take responsibility for their learning and faculty attend to that, using clear standards of evaluation.

Studies show clear disparities between faculty expectations of community college students and these students' readiness to meet those expectations and to be active participants in their education. Faculty need to take responsibility for defining student learning outcomes and using them in embedded assessment. The work of Barr and Tagg and that of Freire are key frames in moving toward closing the gap between student preparedness and faculty expectations, because they focus on the conditions within which the students are learning. Their shared emphasis is to translate the goals in a way that creates the conditions under which students can make progress, whatever their goals.

This is a view from the front lines, where educational theory intersects with the realities at Los Angeles City College.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the visibility of learning outcomes within an academic institution permits the re‐imagining of general education as the conscious development in students of expertise that is more general than and perhaps more important than the specific outcomes of any major.

The study of expertise shows that it is a dynamic state; in any field of endeavor, experts learn differently than non‐experts. Likewise the study of students shows similar differences. Consciously developing the ability to learn well contributes greatly to becoming an expert in a specialized field.

The paper finds that explicitly attending to the progressive development of students' abilities to learn, and the application of those abilities in majors, creates a different model for general education.

Enabling explicit institutional attention to learning outcomes changes the assumed context for general education and opens up new possibilities.

The aim of this paper is to describe how a college or university can develop the organizational capacity to focus on student learning outcomes. It seeks to show how the consistent application of this capacity would provide not only a response to external expectations, but also unexpected benefits that, when taken together, would create a significantly better academic institution.

Six years of research and development, primarily as part of an expanding collaborative endeavor between participating colleges/universities and an independent academic R&D firm, has provided a laboratory for iteratively creating and testing new academic processes and supporting technologies.

Five essential elements of outcomes assessment, when incorporated into a system‐supported academic process, can enable an institution to generate data on actual student learning directly out of its regular program wherever and whenever it chooses to do so, with seven significant benefits.

The organizational capacity described in this paper directly overcomes organizational invisibility of student achievement within its educational program – a century‐old deficiency within higher education.

Looks at different teaching methods and what works for some young people in schools – relevance, allowing the learner to comprehend the higher purpose of learning, and, involving the learner actively in the process – and what doesn’t.

An advertorial for a company that supplies e‐learning. Tells us a little about the courses they develop and the benefits of them.

Government and IT ‐ In spite of all the lip service paid by Government to making a business of information and encouraging increases in the amount of information available online, the Department of Trade is still indulging in foot dragging about online access to tradenames. Since 1979, tradenames have been held on computer and I was told in that year (NLW, November 1979) by the Department of Trade that an index to tradenames would be produced shortly and sold to libraries and others on COM‐fiche. Now two computer indexes are poised for the public market, but it seems the Department of Trade is once again playing a will we? won't we? game, because if the Department went online, the others might not bother. The first independent computer data base is with Datema Limited who have carried out very successful field trials with Laurence Tagg in Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne Business Library, as well as at Sheffield and the Science Reference Library; the second data base is with Compu‐Mark (UK) Limited in London.

Beyond the idea of the city as ‘an abstract terrain for business operations’ (Greenfield, 2013), this chapter analyses alternative constructions and research processes for engaging with ideas of smart cities and digital spatiality, drawing upon the author's arts-based research making virtual reality installations. The chapter describes workshops in which participants have navigated virtual and analogue city spaces, discussing their own ideas of smartness and the mapping of cities. These workshops took place off and online, collaboratively framing intelligences beyond the extractivist logic of surveillance and the Internet of things. In the making of this work, questions of what we mean by smartness and futurity were materialised. The chapter expands on these projects and questions, asking what kinds of design prevents social equality (Ansari, 2020; Irani, 2015), who is left out of these constructs and why? The author draws upon this work in relation to Waterford, examining how the specific historical and contemporary contexts and topography of the city informs a situated approach to technologies of representation. Rivers, from the Thames to the ‘artificial’ Huangpu, the Suir and John's River in Waterford, in their contingency and ontological instability, run through the chapter as a situating, post-human presence.