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Anecdotal evidence indicates that there is a backlog in the pre-tertiary school infrastructure in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The purpose of this paper is to assess the adoption of alternative building technologies (ABT) for pre-tertiary educational infrastructure delivery with a view to providing empirical evidence that could guide policy responses towards its wider adoption.

The study adopted a mixed methodology approach. This comprises a triangulation of a questionnaire survey and interviews. In total, 100 participants were randomly selected from 182 built environment professionals namely quantity surveyors, architects and engineers (electrical, mechanical, civil and structural) from the Department of Roads and Public Works (DRPW), who are currently involved in the Eastern Cape School Building Program (ECSBP). The questionnaire survey was supplemented by semi-structured interviews conducted with four top government officials (three from the Department of Education (DoE) and one from DRPW) who were also part of the questionnaire survey. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics and phenomenological interpretation respectively.

The key findings showed that the level of adoption of ABT for pre-tertiary school infrastructure in the Eastern Cape province is primarily influenced and explained by perceptions that ABT offers inferior quality products compared to the conventional method, and limited awareness of its benefits.

The study provides useful insights into the implications of the limited awareness of ABT as a an alternative technology for educational infrastructure delivery and policy responses towards its wider adoption and environmental sustainability.

Empirical evidence from this study indicates that the main motivation for the adoption of ABT is the limited government’s budget to cope with school infrastructural backlog, while environmental sustainability benefit is only secondary. Nonetheless, the realization that the backlogs in the provision of school infrastructure has resulted from sole reliance on the use of the conventional method is an indication of the potential that the adoption of ABT holds for minimizing of the backlog.

This systematic literature review aims to identify the pattern of data mining (DM) research by looking at the levels and aspects of education.

This paper reviews 113 conference and research papers from well-known publishers of educational data mining (EDM) and learning analytics-related research using a recognized literature review in computer science by Carrera-Rivera et al. (2022a). Two major stages, planning and conducting the review, were used. The databases of Elsevier, Springer, IEEE, SAI, Hindawi, MDPI, Wiley, Emerald and Sage were searched to retrieve EDM papers from the period 2017 to 2023. The papers retrieved were then filtered based on the application of DM to the three educational levels – basic, pre-tertiary and tertiary education.

EDM is concentrated on higher education. Basic education is not given the needed attention in EDM. This does not enhance inclusivity and equity. Learner performance is given much attention. Resource availability and teaching and learning are not given the needed attention.

This review is limited to only EDM. Literature from the year 2017 to 2023 is covered. Other aspects of DM and other relevant literature published in EDM outside the research period are not considered.

As the current trend of EDM shows an increase in zeal, future research in EDM should concentrate on the lower levels of education to identify the challenges of basic education which serves as the core of education. This will enable addressing the challenges of education at an early stage and facilitate getting a quality education at all levels of education. Appropriate EDM techniques for mining the data at this level should be the focus of the research. Specifically, techniques that can cater for the variation in learner abilities and the appropriate identification of learner needs should be considered.

Content sequencing is necessary in facilitating an easy understanding of concepts. Curriculum design from basic to higher education dwells much on this. Identifying the challenge of learning at the early stages will facilitate efficient learning. At the basic level of learning, data on learning should be collected by educational institutions just as it is done at the tertiary level. This will enable EDM to accurately identify the challenges and appropriate solutions to educational problems. Resource availability is a catalyst for effective teaching and learning. The attributes of a learner will enable knowing the true nature of the learner to determine the prospects of the learner.

This research has not been published in any journal. The information presented is the original knowledge of the authors. However, a pre-print of the work is in Research Square.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the ongoing debate about the instructional languages in Moroccan education through exploring graduate students’ attitudes towards the potential use of English-medium instruction (EMI) in Moroccan science universities.

In this study, 17 master and doctoral students have been interviewed to explore attitudes towards EMI implementation in Moroccan higher education. The data were collected and analysed based on constant comparative method, which belongs to the grounded theory methodology. The method is based on organizing the raw data into categories according to shared attributes while constantly comparing the parts of the data as they occur. The objective is to formulate new hypotheses and theories about the phenomenon of interest.

The findings of this study reveal that although graduate students hold positive attitudes towards the future implementation of EMI in higher education, they think students are not prepared for such a switch in the language of instruction given that they have been taught through either Arabic or French in lower levels. Hence, they suggest gradual implementation of EMI in lower levels and introduction of English as a foreign language instead of French at primary level.

Most of the previous studies on bilingual education and EMI have investigated non-Anglo-Saxon contexts, where English is the major foreign or second language. The researchers could not have located any study which investigates the possibility to implement EMI in post-colonial contexts, where other foreign languages, bearing colonial conations, are more dominant than English. This study presents the case of Morocco, where French, rather than English, is the dominant foreign language not only in education but also in different other domains of life.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how one tertiary enabling programme designed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students uses a specifically designed pedagogy which goes beyond a focus on discrete academic skills to help students develop the resilience and knowledge about learning they need to be successful in tertiary learning contexts.

A narrative methodology is used to explore how graduates analysed and evaluated their experience of the course.

The stories show that for these students, resilience is a dynamic and multifaceted construct. Strength, confidence and resilience for these students come from seeing and valuing the strength and resilience that already exists in Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledge systems and using this as a basis for developing their own resilience.

This focus on resilience can provide a transformative experience for students who have largely been marginalised from the mainstream educational system, assisting them to build the crucial “cultural capital” required to be successful in their tertiary studies, while reinforcing the strength and knowledge they already bring with them. Through this process students are offered a way of navigating the higher education landscape on their own terms.

Strategies for teaching engineering in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been evolving over the past decades due to innovations in technology, as well as the development of educational methodologies. In the recent past, the focus for engineering faculty has been not only on promoting the skills needed to raise the level of employability of Emirati graduates, but increasingly on new educational methodologies, e-learning and wireless networked laptop technology. Students in the UAE exhibit certain characteristics emerging from a variety of cultural and historical traditions, as well as from methodologies of education used at the pre-tertiary levels. These characteristics include expecting to be passive recipients of taught information, and lack of independence in their approach to problem solving. In this paper I discuss the development of strategies to facilitate the transition of students from passive to active learning; examine the role of technology-driven educational methodologies in promoting independent and group-centered learning skills; and use a case study to explore the instruction of Engineering Design and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and to examine how classroom management techniques have changed as a result of the growing use of technology.

In 1974 the University of Newcastle, Australia, established a mature age access programme called the Open Foundation. Since that time, thousands of adults have entered university through the Open Foundation portal. This article explores the layers of context for the establishment of the Open Foundation in the early 1970s. It seeks to understand the reasons why the University of Newcastle, which already provided the means for direct entry for some adults, sought to widen participation for adults at that time by creating a year long pre‐tertiary programme. Pascoe’s explanation that matureage entry schemes in Australian universities were prompted by ‘pragmatic considerations’ such as the disruption to intakes due to the lengthening of secondary schooling in New South Wales in 1969 and the falling demand for university places in the late 1970s and 1980s, does not satisfactorily account for the establishment of the Open Foundation Programme. Rather this article argues that the Open Foundation was set up in response to a variety of international, national and local influences, and as a reflection of educational ideas that were flowing from overseas at the time, especially around the establishment of the Open University in the United Kingdom, and in which not only pragmatism, but also idealism figured.

The research attempts to aim to evaluate the perception that different stakeholder groups have of one of the largest and most important Romanian university with respect to its sustainability orientation. The exploratory empirical research reveals some important aspects which must be closely pursued and properly implemented by the management of the university to further develop sustainability strategies. The paper offers a novel approach regarding the way a university can and must focus on different specific measures on sustainability to gain a better position on the educational market, to attract new students and lifelong learning (LLL) programme participants, as well as to become a trend setter for defining and transferring good practices within the society.

Data were collected by questionnaires and in-depth-interview guides which were distributed to different stakeholder groups: bachelor (undergraduate) and master’s students versus LLL programme participants coming from different high schools across the country enrolled on a training course organized by the university and high school principals versus staff members of the university holding coordination and/or management positions. The collected data were then analyzed by means of econometric analysis. Data validity, reliability and internal consistency were checked (Cronbach’s α coefficient, “item-to-total” correlation, the KMO criterion (>0.7) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity). With the help of exploratory factor analysis, the way in which different stakeholders value and perceive the specific measures and efforts undertaken by the university has been extracted.

Students, LLL participants and members of the university staff perceived the university’s positive orientation towards sustainability and the measures taken in this respect. All stakeholders expressed highly favourable opinions of the university’s dealings with different sustainability aspects, such as its attitude towards its employees, its performance within the higher education market and its establishment of an attractive and innovative educational programme, in compliance with sustainability principles, environmental protection and modern attitudes towards society.

The research has been conducted on a sample of students of bachelor and master level, belonging to the biggest faculty of the university (as to number of students and staff). In a more comprising study, the focus should also be on bachelor, master and PhD students of the other faculties of the university, as well as on citizens of the community or in general on people from Transylvania and/or Romania. The university under investigation is one of the most important employers of the region. Further dimensions of sustainable development could also be pursued in a future study.

The university shows an orientation towards civil society by means of specific actions and programs. The university supports and takes part in the organization of cultural and artistic events in cooperation with local authorities and other cultural and/or social institutions and organizations. Respondents also refer to some examples of best practices that might be applied by education institutions to educate young people towards developing a proper sustainable mentality.

There exist almost no comparative empirical studies of sustainability on Romanian universities that take account of the perspectives of students, LLL participants and staff members. The findings have a high potential in developing a proper strategy for the university involved but could also be used by the government if designing a national wide policy regarding this issue. Different authors argue that young people are more conscious about sustainability, organic stuff, environmental protection, green marketing, etc. Taking into consideration the sensitivity of young peoples (students, staff members, etc.), as well as the fact that the university establishes social trends, the idea of studying sustainability in a university could be regarded as a novelty approach.

The purpose of this paper is to present a report on a tracer study conducted to find out the extent to which entrepreneurship education received by tertiary tourism graduates had been beneficial to them.

Application of mixed methods research to collect data from 205 tertiary education graduates by the use of snowball sampling techniques and two entrepreneurship teachers selected purposively.

The study revealed that <3 per cent of the graduates were operating their own businesses. Among the reasons given for the low level of entrepreneurship practice among the graduates included their inability to access initial capital, absence of entrepreneurship spirit in the graduates and the unrelated nature of entrepreneurship education studied at the polytechnic to the tourism and hospitality industry.

The main limitation with this study was sampling bias associated with the snowball sampling technique. This was, however reduced by initially selecting respondents to represent the various year groups of the alumni. In addition, it would have been more appropriate to have included present students in the study to find out their perception of the entrepreneurship education that they are receiving.

The practical implication of this tracer study is the need for educators to evaluate the entrepreneurship programme to make it subject specific. The work will therefore help tourism educators to prepare syllabi and teach entrepreneurship education that will be relevant and beneficial to tourism and hospitality graduates. Another implication is the need to start teaching entrepreneurship as a course at the basic school level.

The social implications of this study is that it would enable managers of tertiary education institutions to find appropriate means to increase the number of its graduates who will be able to create their own jobs. These entrepreneurs will be able to create more employment avenues.

The novelty of the work is in the use of a tracer study to obtain occupational distribution of graduates of a tertiary programme that enabled the author to ascertain the percentage of graduates who have started and are managing their own businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of transformational and transactional leadership behaviours on local government worker’s job satisfaction as well as to determine which one of these two leadership behaviours is a better predictor of job satisfaction among local government servants in Ghana.

The research used a questionnaire to collect 322 usable data from the respondents, and employed multiple regressions to analyse the data.

The results showed that both transformational leadership and transactional leadership behaviours have significant positive effects on employee job satisfaction in Ghana’s Local Government service. Surprisingly, critical examination of the results further revealed that transactional leadership behaviour is a better predictor of job satisfaction relative to transformational leadership behaviour in Ghana’s Local Government Service. Moreover, the findings suggested that the influence of both leadership behaviours on job satisfaction may vary by workers’ age, level of education and gender.

These results imply that the more transactional and transformational leadership behaviours are exhibited or demonstrated by leaders, the more satisfaction local government servants will experience with their jobs. It further means that depending on the context or work environment, transactional leadership can surpass transformational leadership in enhancing employee outcomes. It also reinforces the need to ensure equity in employee reward systems as well as treatment of different age, educational and gender groups.

This result has contributed to knowledge by providing empirical evidence to refute the popular claim that transformation leadership produces better outcomes than transactional leadership. Besides, this study highlights the important roles of transformational and transactional styles in ensuring job satisfaction among the local government sub-sector, a generally under-researched sector.

This study aimed to acquire knowledge about Singapore secondary school (ages 13 to 16 years old) students' skills in searching, evaluating and using information.

A comprehensive instrument encompassing the basic information literacy (IL) skills, as well as a new dimension of ethical usage of information and collaborative information seeking was used for data collection. From August to November 2010, a total of eight schools comprising 3,164 students participated in this study.

It was a matter of concern that various kinds of libraries, including school libraries, were found to be under-utilized. From the test that was administered to assess the IL skills of students, the results were found to be generally unsatisfactory as each of the major categories of IL skills recorded a score that is below 50 (out of a maximum of 100) except for “task definition”. For skills related to “information seeking strategies”, “location & access” and “information use”, the types of schools, academic streams of study, and students' family background seemed to have significant influences.

This study is the first large-scale survey conducted in Singapore that sought to test the IL skills of secondary school students. The findings are useful in assessing the current effectiveness of IL integration, and the need for a more planned approach towards IL competency training within the school curriculum in Singapore.