Educ. Sci., Volume 6, Issue 2 (June 2016) – 7 articles

The college and university presidency is one of the most coveted positions in academe. Due to the projected retirements of current Historically Black College and University (HBCU) presidents, the researchers interviewed 21 current presidents, institutional board members, and presidential search firm personnel to explore what current HBCU leadership identifies as important mentoring/mentee practices, mentoring/mentee opportunities, and professional advice for HBCU presidential aspirants to consider. The findings, based on the coding and analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews, revealed that self-awareness, focusing on the essential aspects of the job and not merely the perks, openness to being mentored and willingness to shadow a successful leader, experience in serving in various administrative capacities, participating in professional leadership development activities, earning of a terminal degree, displaying humility, understanding academic politics, and learning how to present oneself as an executive is important in the preparation of a leader of an HBCU. Full article

In this article, a massive open online course (MOOC) made by and for Swedish teachers will be presented and discussed in order to determine what possibilities and dilemmas are involved when creating and participating in an MOOC that is meant to be a community rather than a course. By analysing interviews of the organisers as well as blog posts and surveys answered by participants, the conclusions that can be drawn point to the ambiguity of the boundary created between participating in a community and in a course. The way one is expected to participate in the MOOC differs from how one is usually expected to participate in professional development courses. The social aspects of a community become the focus for the participants in the MOOC rather than the content that it is addressing. The skeletal structure of the MOOC inhibits the participation of those who are unaccustomed to the digital environment where it takes place. Furthermore, the division of labour between participants and organisers is affected by the notion of course and therefore becomes ambiguous and creates tensions for both organisers and participants. Full article

This contribution, based on the DICONALE ON LINE and COMBIDIGILEX (FFI2015-64476-P) research projects, aims to create an onomasiological bilingual dictionary with online access for German and Spanish verbal lexemes. The objective of this work is to present the most relevant contributions of the dictionary based on two lexemes from the COGNITION conceptual field, the LERNEN/APRENDER subfield. The DICONALE dictionary aims to fill the gap left by the current German–Spanish bilingual lexicography. The novelty is not only the electronic format, but also the inclusion of paradigmatic and syntagmatic information into one dictionary, and the contrastive aspects, subjects that until now have not been found in any onomasiological dictionaries in this area. In addition to the description of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships, it also presents certain characteristics related to the contrastive analysis of the two lexemes. On the one hand, it aims to offer a panoramic view of the most relevant features of the dictionary while, on the other hand, attempting to demonstrate the relevance of said criteria in the contrasting German-Spanish lexicography. Full article

Community schools have recently (re)emerged in the United States as a vital, comprehensive strategy for addressing poverty-related barriers to children’s school learning. However, not all low-income school communities are endowed with the resources needed to launch a comprehensive array of school-based/linked services and programs. In this article, the authors describe a place-based model for school improvement for low-income school communities where formal and fiscal resources are in short-supply. Framed by two best-practice interventions from the youth development and family support literatures, the authors identify five “high leverage” improvement mechanisms that social workers, educators, and parents can collaboratively target to affect change. These improvement mechanisms, together with the interventions they implicate, can help community school efforts provide a more powerful, engagement-focused reach into students’ peer, family, and community ecologies. Full article

This paper aims at discussing the advantages of a methodology design grounded on a concept-based approach to Terminology applied to the most prominent scenario of current Higher Education: blended learning. Terminology is a discipline that aims at representing, describing and defining specialized knowledge through language, putting order into our universe (Nuopponen, 2011). Concepts, as elements of the structure of knowledge (Sager, 1990) emerge as a complex research object. Can they be found in language? A concept-based approach to Terminology implies a clear-cut view of the role of language in terminological work: though language is postulated as being a fundamental tool to grasp, describe and organize knowledge, an isomorphic relationship between language and knowledge cannot be taken for granted. In other words, the foundational premise of a concept-based approach is that there is no one-to-one correspondence between atomic elements of knowledge and atomic elements of linguistic expression. This is why a methodological approach to Terminology merely based upon specialized text research is regarded as biased (Costa, 2013). As a consequence, we argue that interactional strategies between terminologist and domain expert deserve particular research attention. To our mind, the key to concept-based terminological work is to carry out a concept analysis of data gathered from a specialised text corpora combined with an elicitation process of the tacit knowledge and concept-oriented discursive negotiation. Following such view, we put forward a methodology to answer the question: how is blended learning defined in the Post-Bologna scenario? Even though there are numerous high-quality models and practical descriptions for its implementation (similarly to other concepts related to distance learning), the need to understand, demarcate and harmonize the concept of blended learning against the current Higher Education background results from the premise that the theoretical reflection on this concept is still insufficient. Therefore, we believe it is vital to understand blended learning as the new normal in Higher Education (Norberg et al., 2011), or a negotiable third way (Peres, 2011; Norberg & Jahnke, 2014). Our methodological model is built in three phases: (1) exploratory phase in the area/ object of the study; (2) conceptual analysis phase of discourse and textual documents; (3) modeling and result validation phase. We support the thesis that the experimental nature of this approach discloses productivity in a cyclical sequence between the discursive and textual analysis with conceptual objectives, collaborative interaction and introspection. In other words, even though the nature of this study does not allow for a generalization (apart from a dual relation in the mediation between the terminologist and the specialist), we advocate the relevance of an action-reflection procedure, both introspective and collaborative, one in which the terminologist will become a conceptualizer, a decision-maker and an interventionist. Full article

Reviewed in this article is the potential for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to transform higher education delivery, accessibility, and costs. Next, five major value propositions for MOOCs are considered (headhunting, certification, face-to-face learning, personalized learning, integration with services external to the MOOC, marketing). Then, four pricing strategies for MOOCs are examined (cross-subsidy, third-party, “freemium”, nonmonetary). Although the MOOC movement has experienced growing pains similar to most innovations, we assert that the unyielding pace of improvements in network technologies combined with the need to tame the costs of higher education will create continuing demand for MOOC offerings. Full article