Book
eLearning Stakeholders and Researchers Summit 2018: Материалы международной конференции
Introduction: Assessing Student Learning Outcomes in Higher Education Until the last decade, objective information on student learning and student learning outcomes in higher education at the national and international levels was scarce. This area was largely underrepresented in comparison to other areas of formal education such as school. In the context of current developments in higher education such as internationalization of study programs and ever-increasing student mobility and the ensuing increase in heterogeneity of students’ learning conditions, the need for objective, valid, and reliable assessment tools that adhere to the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing set out by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) has become urgent. This has led to intense research efforts being made within and across many countries, which are of great practical and political importance. This book presents the most significant of these initiatives and developments in order to highlight the tremendous work national and international research communities have done in this area over the past decade. A broad range of national and international assessment research projects and curricular innovation initiatives in higher education focusing on both domain-specific and generic student learning outcomes are presented in this volume. Results and lessons learned from various research programs such as the German Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHs) and feasibility studies such as the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO; an international comparative study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) of students’ generic skills and economic and engineering competencies) form the basis of several ongoing initiatives by testing institutes to make assessments suitable for use in higher education abroad. Examples include the Educational Testing Service’s (ETS) Heighten Outcomes assessment and the Council for Aid to Education’s (CAE) Collegiate Learning Assessment CLA+. At the European level, the CALOHEE initiative on Measuring and Comparing Achievements of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education in Europe aims to develop a joint basis for learning outcomes in higher education as well as curricula in five disciplines, including education. One of the most current international initiatives, the International Collaborative for Performance Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (iPAL), focuses on developing performance assessments of learning that meet high standards in psychometric quality criteria and are suitable for use at higher education institutions across nations. The compilation of this work in the present book shows where we stand today and the progress that has been made in this field of research with newly developed theoretically conceptualized approaches to modeling and measurement instruments for empirical studies. It also illustrates which issues have not yet been thoroughly addressed by the – indeed very active – research community measuring student learning in higher education. Therefore, this book offers a sound basis for further research, highlighting the current challenges and future perspectives in measuring learning and learning outcomes in higher education we need to deal with in the next decades.
This paper studies the results of integration of massive open online courses (MOOCs) into curriculum of the ESP (English for specific purposes) course at the department of Business Informatics of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE). The experimental teaching with integration of MOOK component in the ESP course have demonstrated that the educational outcome in this case may be higher than in a traditional course, due to the increase of students motivation provided by individualized learning, the use of modern authentic teaching materials, participation in international educational community. Research findings illustrate that imbedding MOOCs in the university ESP course could become the basis for the integrated study of special subjects and the English language in the international learning community, under the condition that on-campus courses have been re-designed to incorporate MOOC-like components.
E-learning development comes with an increased attention to its quality that is managed via the control over not only the learners’ knowledge but over the learning process, its organization and applied tools. This paper covers Tomsk State University experience in MOOC quality evaluation, in particular popular science MOOCs and specialized ones. The quality evaluation system implies the evaluation of the MOOC materials, the learning process and the results.
The paper presents a survey on methods, means and practices of electronic text encoding with help of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). We focus on the broad range of possibilities and ready-made solutions offered by the TEI Consortium and review a sizeable range of digital publication projects that employ the standard.
Successful online learning if we look outside the didactics but in the field of personal development, from the anthropological bases, is in learner’s identification as an active subject of the learning process. Activities that online learners perform correlate with the characteristics of the subjectness that researchers revealed: spotting one’s own gaps in the educational environment and one’s educational needs, satisfying them and enhancing one’s competence by means of online learning (ability to change the environment and oneself inside that, reflexive way of life, realizing the principle of development), searching, selecting and studying online courses on one’s own, supported first and foremost by the intrinsic motivation (initiative), ability to plan and analyze one’s activity or inaction in the course, managing the requirements and the deadlines of the assignments, as well as readiness to accept the consequences of one’s choice (responsibility). Therefore, successful online learners (those who study on their own, cope with the tasks in time and in a proper way, achieve expected results) are characterized with such a subjectness that is based on a set of general-cultural and general-professional competencies that should be formed. To define the set of competencies, which an online learner needs to become successful and to study learners’ attitude to them, we have done a competency-based test (self-assessment questionnaire) in September - November 2017. The respondents were 2060 learners from TSU online courses offered on three e-learning platforms (population is 80938). Learners responded that the following general-cultural competencies are of much help for them in online learning: readiness to self-development, self-realization and using one’s own creativity (69,7%), ability to organize and educate oneself (53,3%), ability to acquire new scientific and professional knowledge using modern educational and informational technologies (62,3%), as well as ability to imply means and methods of learning and self-control over one’s intellectual development, increasing one’s cultural level and professional competence (50,2%). Among general-professional competencies the learners replied that the most useful competencies for online learning are computer skills for receiving, processing and managing information (79,5%), ability to work with the main retrieval query systems (60,2%), ability to search for scientific information, perform its critical analysis, to set research objectives and choosing appropriate methods and technologies to achieve them (59,3%), ability to critically analyze the learning process and training materials from the point of view of their effectiveness (54%) and ability to use polite manners in oral and written speech (21,9%). At the same time, the respondents define general-cultural competencies as more significant. Therefore, the survey results proved our idea that successful online learning requires firstly, a set of general-cultural competences (those which are connected to the learner’s personal development and his/ her subjectness in the learning process) and secondly, a set of general-professional competencies to be formed. This led us to the idea that assessing learner’s level of the general-cultural competences we can predict his/ her future success in taking online courses.
The paper argues that we should rethink the relation between facts and scholarship in the humanities. This thesis should not be misunderstood as an argument for unreflective positivism. But new technological developments in the 'digital humanities' suggest that the collection of facts in machine-readable form (e. g. as 'nanopublications') facilitates new strategies for interpreting, visualizing or archiving information in the humanities. The paper discusses a concrete application of these insights in the history of philosophy, namely the use of nanopublications as an instrument in 'collective doxography'.
The article compares the results of learners which had been studying economics in two different ways - traditional education with lectures/seminars and online education (as part of the massive open online course). In both cases, students were asked identical questions on the same topic of the introductory course in economics. Classes was conducted by the same teacher. According to the comparison results, secondary school pupils demonstrated better performance than online-learners. However adult students of the second higher education program had results very close to the results of online students (such as grade distribution, average score for every question).
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.