Trends in Higher Education

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is a field of cultural transmission in which communities, practices, knowledge, skills, and forms of expression are reinterpreted across generations. Its integration into teacher education can connect local cultural knowledge with pedagogical design, digital technologies, and reflective professional learning. This study explores the experiences and perceptions of primary teachers participating in a distance-training programme focused on the Kastoria Carnival (Ragoutsaria), an example of living intangible cultural heritage. The programme, implemented through the Centre for Training and Lifelong Learning (KEDIVIM) of the University of Western Macedonia, incorporated UNESCO’s six-step pedagogical approach to living heritage. An exploratory qualitative design was adopted. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, reflective narratives, and educational artefacts produced by participating teachers. The data were examined through thematic analysis, combining sensitizing categories from the conceptual framework with emergent themes. Triangulation across the three sources strengthened trustworthiness. Participants described ICH as a community-based resource associated with cultural awareness, pedagogical planning, digital storytelling, and reflective professional learning. They also identified challenges concerning cultural material selection and interpretation, digital competence, time requirements, and transforming local knowledge into educational activities. The study illustrates how distance education and ICT can support context-sensitive pedagogical design through living heritage approaches.

This study sought to understand how the prevalence of employer-articulated technical and professional graduate skills shifted over a recent 13-year period to identify areas for curricular change. We analyzed 1,142,245 graduate-level mechanical engineering job advertisements posted between January 2010 and December 2022 in the United States from the Burning Glass Technologies (BGT) database. To track shifts in the prevalence of specific skills, we developed a Bayesian-optimized filter, trained on human labels, to classify relevant jobs, then modeled them using BGT’s canonical skill taxonomy. This filtering and modeling process identifies employer-desired competencies across 13 years, while demonstrating a replicable method for other disciplines and job data. We find 76 skills with an average prevalence of at least 2% that follow a clearly linear, logarithmic, or quadratic growth trajectory. The findings paint the portrait of a discipline firmly connected to its technical core, but transforming with demand for “business-aware technical liaisons” and “proficient software executors.” Business liaisons can complete technical work while managing the projects, budgets, supply chains, customer relations, and compliance mechanisms that come with it. Software executors use software-based systems to complete and communicate their organization-supporting work. Together, these profiles signal changes in graduate employability that universities can address through multiple approaches, such as collaborating with other academic units and disciplines and increasing access to bridge programs.

The Cognitive Load Scale (CLS) is a widely used instrument for measuring intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load in a specific learning activity, but no validated Spanish-language version exists for health professions students in Latin America. This study aimed to adapt the CLS to a semester-level frame of reference (CLS-S), suitable for macro-curricular evaluation, and evaluate its psychometric properties among Chilean undergraduate health professions students. An observational, cross-sectional, and instrumental study was conducted with a non-probability sample of 1901 students from six health programs at a multicenter Chilean university. Following content validation by six experts, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA; n = 349) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA; n = 1552) were performed, together with reliability estimation (Cronbach’s α and McDonald’s ω), measurement invariance testing between female and male students, and convergent validity analysis using Spearman correlations with the SISCO-II academic stress inventory. Content validity met the pre-specified criterion of Aiken’s V ≥ 0.8 for all items (observed range 0.833–1.000). The CFA confirmed the theoretical three-dimensional structure with an excellent fit (CFI = 0.989; TLI = 0.984; RMSEA = 0.0525; SRMR = 0.0220), high internal reliability (overall ω = 0.888), and strict measurement invariance between women and men. Scalar invariance was additionally supported across campus, academic programme, and academic year. Intrinsic and extraneous load was associated mainly with stressors, symptoms, and behavioral reactions, whereas germane load was the only dimension associated with coping strategies; all convergent correlations were small to moderate in magnitude. The semester-level Chilean CLS-S is a valid and reliable instrument, invariant for female–male comparisons, for evaluating the cognitive demands of curricular blocks in health professions education; its application to individual learning activities would require the separate validation of an activity-level version.