Search Results for
"Higher education"

Internships are widely recognized within higher education as a useful work-based learning (WBL) approach to enhance student employability. However, there remains a need to understand whether internships provide a developmental experience that includes higher-level (soft) skills such as self-responsibility, flexibility and innovation. Our study inductively analyses 154 undergraduate student-interns’ reflective diaries over a 3-year period to explore the relationship between internship experience and the development of higher-level skills, or protean ‘meta-competencies’. In the research, we find the interns’ developed three meta-competencies that can broadly be categorized as self-regulation, self-awareness and self-direction. Our findings also highlight the role of socio-political dynamics of internship work in shaping students’ experiences as an indicator of the changing world of work. The study has implications for higher education institutions (HEIs) and host organisations in adopting a WBL approach that supports interns with reflexive engagement with situated organizational practices and accessing (in)formal learning opportunities in the workplace. Our research, therefore, offers insights into a learner-centred WBL approach that contributes towards a more holistic internship/WBL experience that facilitates student interns in developing protean meta-competencies and graduate employability. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Interdisciplinary education has become increasingly prominent as a core instrument to prepare the next generation workforce. Yet, little is known about the impacts of long-term degree-oriented interdisciplinary education on post-graduation outcomes. This paper aims to investigate the influence of long-term degree-oriented interdisciplinary education on graduates’ post-graduation plan choices and labour market outcomes using unique administrative micro-data and career-tracking data from a comprehensive research university. Our results indicate that higher levels of engagement in interdisciplinary learning increase the probability of pursuing future study and employment in a field that differs from a graduate’s college degree, and are also associated with a higher probability to enter the workforce. Yet, this positive association between interdisciplinary learning and the probability of entering the workforce is specific to graduates from traditional disciplinary programmes. Additionally, our findings suggest that the impact of long-term degree-oriented interdisciplinary education on early labour market outcomes is overall beneficial but varies across degree fields. The findings of our study provided partial evidence in support of the influence of long-term degree-oriented interdisciplinary education on post-graduation plan choices and early labour market outcomes. We suggest that given resource constraints, higher education institutions could consider relaxing module choice restrictions in traditional disciplinary programmes to promote interdisciplinary education. However, it is important to note that higher education institutions should carefully consider the potential trade-off between the breadth of interdisciplinary content and the depth of specialist content, in order to strike a balance. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In the context of the development tendency of artificial intelligence, the paper describes the opportunities and challenges artificial intelligence brings to business English talent training, innovates and reforms innovative business negotiation talent training methods, and develops independent innovation according to the future development trend of artificial intelligence. The paper discusses the practical activities of training business English talents using artificial intelligence. It mainly focuses on the indicators of building the entity model of business English talents training through artificial intelligence technical RBF ne ural network, grasping the genetic algorithm from four aspects such as the number of gender chromosomes, integral function formula calculation, genetic algorithm, RBF neural network parameters to optimize the entity model and genetic algorithm, and optimizing the limitation of RBF neural network according to the genetic algorithm. The RBF neural network entity model with the genetic algorithm is used to implement detailed analysis and scientific research exploration of the business English talent training evaluation system. The database deviation index and precision index values under the two entity models were implemented for comparison operation. The experimental results show that under the deviation index, the RBF neural network entity model, according to the genetic algorithm, converges quickly and longer than the RBF entity model. Regarding the precision index, the genetic algorithm RBF neural network has a higher precision than 0.94 for every 60 teams, while the RBF model has a precision of 0.84. This research allows for a more accurate analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of school students in business English. Teachers need to improve their academic performance and quality based on their strengths and weaknesses to facilitate the shaping of more excellent business English talents for China. It is important to explore the way of training business English talents under artificial intelligence to accelerate the innovative development of English education and training in China and the trend of English development. © 2023 Ruoxi Hu et al., published by Sciendo.

In the context of the rapid development of the Internet and big data technology, it is both an opportunity and a challenge for cultivating "dual-innovation"talents in ethnic regions. This paper proposes a fuzzy hierarchical analysis-fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model to study the cultivation mechanism of "dual-creative"talents in ethnic regions. The fuzzy hierarchical analysis-fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model consists of the evaluation system, a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, and a fuzzy hierarchical analysis. Then, based on the characteristics of fuzzy hierarchical analysis, the factors are organized and stratified to obtain a reasonable index set and build a hierarchical analysis structure. Using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to analyze the school-enterprise cooperation in the integration of industry education in Tibetan higher vocational colleges, the results show that 55.4% of the students chose extremely unsatisfactory and unsatisfactory, indicating that they are not satisfied with the current communication status between the school and the internship enterprises, and another 28.6% of the students chose uncertainty full or unsatisfactory. This study explores the causes of the problems in the integration of industry-education personnel training from four levels: government, enterprises, society, and schools, and proposes guiding reference values for the integration of industry-education personnel training in Tibetan higher education institutions. © 2023 Caixiu Lu, published by Sciendo.

Is it possible to measure how critical soft skills like leadership or teamwork are from the viewpoint of graduate studies offerings? This paper provides a conceptual and methodological framework that introduces the concept of a bipartite network as a practical way to estimate the importance of soft skills as socio-emotional abilities trained in graduate studies. We examined 230 graduate programs offered by 49 higher education institutions in Colombia to estimate the empirical importance of soft skills from the viewpoint of graduate studies offerings. The results show that: (a) graduate programs in Colombia share 31 soft skills in their intended learning outcomes; (b) the centrality of these skills varies as a function of the graduate pro- gram, although this variation was not statistically significant; and (c) while most central soft skills tend to be those related to creativity (i.e. creation or generation of ideas or projects), leadership (to lead or teamwork), and analytical orientation (e.g. evaluating situations and solving problems), less central were those related to empathy (i.e. understanding others and acknowledgment of others), ethical thinking, and critical thinking, posing the question if too much emphasis on most visible skills might imply an unbalance in the opportunities to enhancing other soft skills such as ethical thinking. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In construction technology education (CTE), construction site tours play an essential role for undergraduate students to obtain familiarity with construction environments, combine content knowledge with practice, and develop their competencies to embrace construction innovations before entering the industry. Implementing real construction site visits for education purposes faces challenges in getting access to proper construction sites and ensuring the safety of visiting students. This study combined the application of Project-based learning (PBL), game-based learning (GBL), and deeper learning theories to develop TheProjectLive ePlatform for students to experience virtual site tours. In this platform, 360-degree panoramas were utilized to present the approximate complexity of construction sites and provide an immersive learning environment. The study evaluated the effects of the proposed virtual site tour approach through two years of implementation in a tertiary course: Introductory Construction Technology and Materials. The students' knowledge acquisition and learning experience when applying the ePlatform were well measured through in-class quizzes and questionnaire surveys, respectively. Based on the descriptive and statistical sources of evidence, the developed ePlatform for conducting the virtual construction site tour demonstrated its potential to effectively improve students' transferable knowledge acquisition. The results of two in-class quizzes designed to assess students' comprehension of content knowledge and their competency to solve practical problems showed that the average scores of students who experienced the virtual site tour were higher than students who learned via lecture notes. Specifically, the average scores of the former were 13.3% and 17.8% higher than the latter in the two quizzes, respectively. According to students' feedback, this case study research also provided suggestions to further improve the proposed virtual site tour approach in tertiary CTE, emphasizing the importance of clear content presentation as well as indicating the benefits of perceived helpfulness and well-designed game elements. © 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Professional training plans play a pivotal role in higher education institutions, as they significantly impact employability, graduate performance, and meeting labour market demands. These aspects serve as crucial indicators in the selection processes for prospective candidates in higher education institutions and in accrediting the quality of both degree programmes and the institutions themselves. This study examines the perceptions of Marine Biology graduates from a university in northern Chile regarding the quality and relevance of the training they received during their undergraduate studies. The graduates express concerns about deficiencies in transferrable skills, such as ‘teamwork’, ‘effective communication’, and ‘conflict resolution’, as well as some technical skills that are vital for preparing graduates with social competences necessary for success in inter- and transdisciplinary contexts, essential in fostering positive interactions between society and the ocean. The study proposes curriculum updates and a strategy for establishing a bidirectional link with Marine Biology graduates, including mutual feedback, fostering graduate loyalty, strengthening ties to the working world, and implementing accountability processes. These aspects are critical in professional training, contributing to the optimisation of curricular plans, enhancing employability, and improving job performance across all disciplines and higher education institutions. © 2023 Royal Society of Biology.

We conduct a systematic literature review of the academic literature on activities organised by higher education Institutions (HEIs) with the aim of improving skills associated with employability and facilitating labour market outcomes. The search resulted in 87 papers followed by an iterative evaluation of their relevance. Papers in the corpus were analysed using an evaluation research framework and classified in terms of the activities, outputs, and outcomes. The reviewed literature is centred on one of three stakeholders: HEIs, students or employers. It suggests all stakeholders value employability activities for similar reasons. Generally, they are seen as a vital part of HEI education programmes, facilitating the development of diverse skills that are desirable in the labour market as well as de-risking labour market entry for students and appointments for employers by alleviating information asymmetries. The evidence base is dominated by small-scale case studies and evaluations that are not sufficiently robust to infer about causal impacts of employability activities on students’ development and labour market outcomes. Moreover, the corpus is skewed towards studies of Work-Related Learning. We set out avenues for future research and argue for a comprehensive evidence base encompassing diverse forms of employability activities, such as larger scale ‘embedded employability’ activities; a more contextual understanding of employability as an interplay between individual and a particular labour market and education system; and a more robust evidence base tracking students from education into the labour market, allowing for selection effects and identifying heterogeneity of impacts across different activities and demographics. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

With the goal of improving the ability of higher education management and student cultivation, this paper applies face recognition technology to higher education management and student cultivation and proposes a new model of digital management and cultivation. By analyzing the recognition process of the face recognition algorithm in face detection and combining the data to describe the deformability of the face, a neural network-based face recognition algorithm is constructed. After inputting the face image data, it passes through several convolutional layers, a linear rectification layer and a pooling layer and finally connects to the fully connected layer so as to achieve the effect of face recognition. The results show that the face recognition technology training state accuracy rate in the 0~3000th generation rises sharply, which can be seen in the neural network in 3500 generations around the rise has gradually leveled off in 5000 generations to reach convergence. Strengthening digital management thinking can improve the management effect to a certain extent and improve the management content so as to achieve the specific management effect. © 2023 Mingsi Jiang, published by Sciendo.

The pedagogical development (PD) for educators in higher engineering education is indispensable to the promotion of educational changes and high-quality teaching and learning necessary to train twenty-first century engineering talents. With the expansion of various PD activities in engineering education in recent decades, there is a growing need to understand the characteristics and impact of current PD activities and to develop strategies for their further development. This study reviews 116 articles to provide an overview of current PD activity designs and the challenges reported in research on engineering education. The selected papers’ frameworks, duration and organizational formats, evaluation methods, teachers’ learning outcomes, research methods, and reported challenges are summarized. The findings of this study call for additional research on theory-driven designs for future PD activities as well as additional empirical PD studies using multiple data sources, a variety of research methods, and various analytical tools. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.