Transitioning To Quality Education

Transitioning to Quality Education focuses on the fourth UN Sustainable Development Goal. According to SDG 4, every learner should acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development (UN 2015, 17). Thus, the aim of sustainability education is to foster learners to be creative and responsible global citizens, who critically reflect on the ideas of sustainable development and the values that underlie them, and take responsible actions for sustainable development (UNESCO 2017). Sustainability is strongly connected to attitudes and values, therefore, applications of sustainability are complicated. Quality education requires teachers to have competences, knowledge, and skills to be able to plan and carry out meaningful education and teaching in sustainability. The aim of Transitioning to Quality Education is to provide versatile experiences and new knowledge on the cognitive, affective, and social issues that are important for promoting sustainable development in formal and non-formal education. Transitioning to Quality Education is part of MDPI's new Open Access book series Transitioning to Sustainability. With this series, MDPI pursues environmentally and socially relevant research which contributes to efforts toward a sustainable world. Transitioning to Sustainability aims to add to the conversation about regional and global sustainable development according to the 17 SDGs. The book series is intended to reach beyond disciplinary, even academic boundaries.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2020, held in Heidelberg, Germany, in September 2020. The 24 research papers and 20 demo and 5 poster papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The European Conference on Technology-Enhance Learning, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, is committed to address global challenges and quality education. The papers deal with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4 and SDG 10, to help to reduce the existing gaps and inequalities between countries and regions from around the world in terms of inclusiveness, equity, access, and quality of education. The chapters: “Designing an Online Self-Assessment for Informed Study Decisions: The User Perspective”; “Living with Learning Difficulties: Two Case Studies Exploring the Relationship Between Emotion and Performance in Students With Learning Difficulties”; “Applying Instructional Design Principles on Augmented Reality Cards for Computer Science Education”; and “Teaching Simulation Literacy With Evacuations - Concept, Technology, and Material for a Novel Approach” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. Due to the Corona pandemic EC-TEL 2020 was held as an virtual event.

This book offers a broad overview of transition practices for incarcerated youth, shaped by local culture, politics, ideologies, and philosophies. It highlights the similarities and differences in international approaches, as well as promising practices. The book is divided into two sections: Section One presents a synthesis of the current research on essential areas shown to promote successful transitions for incarcerated youth, using the Taxonomy for Transition Programming 2.0 as a cohesive framework, Section Two focuses on national perspectives on topical issues impacting local transition practices and/or policy. It provides information pertaining to the respective countries and a summary of key facets of their juvenile justice system, including successful or promising approaches and programs used in transition. This book benefits academics and researchers from a broad range of fields, policy makers and leadership teams from various agencies, associations, and government departments with an interest in juvenile and youth justice, social work, and special education courses on transition planning.

Business education is a critical ingredient in establishing a viable middle class of managers in transitioning and developing economies. Compiled in association with the Center for International Business Education and Research, this comprehensive examination of business and management education, pedagogical models, and curricula innovations in institutions around the world is the first such work to emphasize emerging markets.

Transitioning Education in Africa explores how transitions from education in emergency to post-conflict education systems are planned and managed at the national level. Using historical analysis of education policies, surveys, and interviews, Cromer shows how these transitions have been failing and how to improve.

This book is one of the first of its kind to examine the aspirations of refugee background students and accompanies them as they journey through the on-shore stage of settlement, enrolment and participation in the Australian education system. It begins with students’ experiences of on-shore settlement, followed by the move into schooling and finally, the subsequent transition into Australian higher education. Transitioning into higher education is a challenge for many students, particularly for those from under-represented equity groups. For refugee background students, navigating in, through and out of higher education can be particularly complex and challenging. Drawing on rich case studies from longitudinal research into refugee youth and the academic and professional staff in schools and universities who support them, the book provides powerful and compelling narratives and insights into this journey. It untangles the complex nature of transition for students of refugee background in higher education, locating it within broader social trends of increasing social and cultural diversity, as well as government practices and policies concerning the educational resettlement of refugees.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The transition to more just and sustainable development requires radical change across a wide range of areas and particularly within the nexus between learning and work. This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training that goes beyond the narrow focus of much of the current literature and policy debate. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this issue through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods. Crucially, it explores learning that takes place informally online, within farmers’ groups, and in public and private educational institutions. Offering new insights and ways of thinking about this field, the book draws out clear implications for theory, policy and practice in Africa and beyond.

The purpose of this dissertation is to try and understand the mechanisms that the Russian State uses to reform higher education, and thus help ensure its legitimacy, within the context of the new global knowledge economy. Most of the discussions to-date on the globalization of knowledge, the role of higher education, and their combined impact on states' competitiveness, focus on developed or developing countries. Very little discussion surrounds the issues faced by countries in economic and political transition. Countries in transition are frequently torn in two opposing directions: it is necessary for them to focus inward for their own internal stability and growth, yet they are very cognizant of the need to integrate into the world economy and correctly direct their internal growth towards international competitiveness. Often, the pull between authoritarian tendencies and liberal economic necessities paralyzes such a State's ability to definitively choose the most appropriate path for growth. Contemporary Russia exemplifies these contradictory tendencies and necessities. While all of the countries in the former Soviet Union participated in the same economic and social system for a good part of the last century, Russia is possibly the closest to the innovation centers in the West in terms of research culture and history, its current educational and technological capabilities, and its professed desire to compete equally in the new global economy. Given Russia's long history and strong tradition of higher education, particularly in the sciences, the country stands to gain from participating in this new global arena. Yet the result will depend on the future of its higher education system. Because of Russia's apparent uncertainty about its political direction, the Russian higher education system faces important questions about how institutional reform will take place and the future of the system's relationship with a State that is itself going through complex changes. The globalization of knowledge required by an integrated world economic system has ramifications for each country's system of higher education. In light of these new global demands and expectations, how does a traditionally authoritarian and nationalistic state in economic and political transition respond to these new global demands for improving higher educational quality, and to internal demands for greater institutional autonomy? Is an authoritarian state able to rationalize its financial constraints with the societal expectation of mass equitable access to higher education, against the pressure to make the national economy more globally competitive? To answer the aforementioned questions requires a theoretical framework that takes into account the relationship between State governance structures and higher educational institutions, while simultaneously taking into consideration how the State reacts to increasing global pressures and expectations. The Russian State is defined in this dissertation as an arena in which political power is contested by the country's economic and political elites. At the same time the State realizes it must represent a majority of the populace in order not to jeopardize its hold on power. It does this primarily through legitimation of its actions by providing social services. Contestation takes place when a State is trying to recreate its power at the same time it is trying to be legitimized. The main contestation therefore is not necessarily within and among the elites, but between the elites and the population as a whole. To be seen as legitimate, the State will try and provide good services for the populace to satisfy their demands and thus minimize contestation. However, this provision of services is only for as long as the populace does not attempt to interfere with the State's version of power. The provision of social goods serves as a "social contract" between the ruling elites and the larger population. The educational system and the State have a relationship of "compensatory legitimation" -- the State attempts to purchase legitimacy by providing public goods such as education. Legitimation becomes even more important in a global environment. Where domestic legitimation would have sufficed in the past, now the need for legitimation extends to the international realm as well. To be considered an educated society, a State must provide a strong educational system that meets international standards. Yet as the State tries to exert control over the higher education system in order to maintain quality, contestation takes place between the State and the intellectual leaders in educational institutions and higher education consumers, both of which have a large stake in the reform process. To ascertain the relationship between the Russian State (e.g., political and economics elites) and administrators of institutions of higher education, and the efficacy of the State's rationalization of the reform process, a series of interviews was conducted with over 60 university, regional and local governmental officials, and Ministry of Education and Science officials. The institutions were chosen from a larger study of universities undertaken by State University -- Higher School of Economics (Moscow), 2008-2011. While evaluating my interviews with Russian higher education administrators, I looked for four identifiers of Russia's willingness to reform higher education for international competitiveness: symbols of domestic legitimacy (academic standards reform and quality improvement); symbols of international legitimacy (accession to Bologna Process); the professionalization of Russian HE (creation of elite institutions); and symbols of institutional autonomy (institutional mergers and closures). One might imagine that the State would attempt to assert control over all aspects of the reform process, most especially in the creation of new academic standards and institutional autonomy. However, the evidence for assertion of control over the higher education system becomes apparent through the indirect financial levers that the State can employ (e.g., direct funding of elite institutions and institutional mergers). The higher education system in Russia is State funded and centrally overseen from Moscow, which already gives it enormous leverage over higher educational institutions. But the control mechanism is through funding (or lack thereof) and not direct coercion. Thus, only part of what we observe in the actual reform process of the Russian higher education system is about modernization and globalization. The remaining thrust of the reform effort revolves around the rationalization of financing balanced against the need to create "world class" universities. This rationalization is important because of the possibility of a decline in demand for higher education in the near term due to the changing demographic situation. It also serves as a mechanism by which the State can regain more effective central control of the higher education system, and ensure a quality system that will be able to further the country's economic development. Despite the fact that the Russian State takes very seriously the need for higher education reform, the State reforms might not work because of the reluctance of university intellectuals, the lack of financing should the global economy and the price of oil decline, the public outcry at mass institutional closures, and the ineffectiveness of the State itself. If this were to happen, the State might have to revert to direct coercion, which might make things worse in the long run both domestically and internationally. As history has demonstrated, the State is ultimately not the most efficient and effective reformer. This inability leads to chaos in the reform process and further undermines the reforms.