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The Center for Water Resource Studies and the Bowling Green Community College of Western Kentucky University formed a partnership to address an anticipated Water & Wastewater Operator/Technician shortage over the next five to seven years. The Water and Wastewater Technician Training Institute (WTTI, pronounced "witty"), is a joint initiative with the employment sector (a number of water & wastewater utilities/municipalities/districts), state primacy agencies and technical assistance/trade associations to refine an industry needs driven curriculum that utilizes on-line course delivery to provide options for both traditional & nontraditional students. This partnership was presented at the 2008 ASEE annual conference. This paper will review the accomplishments and the lessons learned by this program over the first year of operation. The partnership has revitalized an existing Associates Degree program entitled "Water Utilities Management". The program requires sixty-seven (67) credit hours, including twenty-five (25) hours of General Education Requirements, twenty-one (21) hours of Business Technology Core courses, and (21) twenty-one hours of Operations Track courses. The Operations Track courses can be focused toward either Water or Wastewater Operations. The program is designed to be delivered entirely online, allowing students to pursue their degree with unparalleled flexibility. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2006-07, there were approximately 11,200 college-level programs that were designed to be completed totally through distance education; 66 percent of these programs were reported as degree programs and the remaining 34 percent were reported as certificate programs. Asynchronous internet-based technologies were cited as the most widely used technology for the instructional delivery of distance education courses; they were used to a large extent in 75 percent and to a moderate extent in 17 percent of the institutions that offered college-level credit-granting distance education courses. The WTTI courses are delivered through an open-source Course Management System (CMS) known as MOODLE (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic learning Environment). The first Operations Track class, entitled Water Supply & Wastewater Control was offered/developed during the Fall semester 2008. This first course, as well as a second course entitled Water Distribution and Wastewater Collection Systems will be available during the Spring semester 2009. As courses are developed, approval is sought for Continuing Education/Contact Hours from Operator Certification Boards in the individual states. Academic content is being provided by core university faculty with support from adjunct faculty eligible staff. All instructors (academic and practitioner) involved in the program are undergoing collaborative professional development to ensure that they are receptive to the unique structure of the program. As a demonstrably functional framework is being put in place, the program is being extrapolated to address other regional policy, academic discipline and industrial sector issues beyond the initial Kentucky and Tennessee target area. University-offered Water and Wastewater Operator Certificate Programs are being developed to fast-track students into the industry and allow current operators to reach advanced certification levels at an accelerated pace. Partnering utilities and municipalities are developing internship and cooperative educational opportunities to ensure work-based experiences for students. Trade associations have committed to developing scholarship programs to lessen the financial burden for potential students. In addition, some individual utilities are offering tuition reimbursement for current employees who are pursuing academic degrees or certificate programs. Finally, an educational outreach program that integrates into high school science curricula is being developed. This program is aimed at recruiting young adults into the water and wastewater industry. © American So for Engineering Education, 2009.

We report on descriptive analyses of classroom observations of the instruction and classroom interactions that took place over four days of a high school pre-engineering class, Project Lead the Way, as participants engaged in project-based learning. Our objective was to study the enacted curriculum and determine how class time was apportioned, the extent to which time was distributed between developing technical skills and fostering conceptual understanding in engineering and mathematics, and the degree to which mathematics concepts were implicitly embedded within the engineering activities or made explicit for students, and therefore more supportive of transfer of learning. Our coding of the video data support the following three main descriptive results: (1) more of the instructor's time was spent on class management (non-instructional) tasks than on any other classroom activity, (2) a greater proportion of the total observed instruction time was devoted to skills rather than concepts, and (3) only a small fraction of instruction that linked math concepts to engineering coursework made those links explicit, while the large majority were implicitly embedded in the activities and the CAD software used in the class. Both positive and negative examples of explicit integration are provided to illustrate these events. We relate these results to prior research on the intended curriculum used to convey the idealized pre-engineering program, and discuss the implications these findings have for fostering deep learning of engineering concepts and supporting the transfer of knowledge to novel tasks and situations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.

The development of the European Qualification Framework (EQF) as a means of assessing the relative status of qualifications across the EU is described, together with its fundamental design characteristics, particularly the adoption of a ‘learning outcomes’ approach. Ways in which it may be implemented, and possible difficulties in this, are explored through a discussion of Zones of Mutual Trust (ZMTs). Convergence and divergence between the Vocational education and training (VET) and qualification systems of selected occupations in England, Germany, France and the Netherlands are highlighted, and their implications for establishing and regulating cross-national equivalence of qualifications, including through the EQF, are explored. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

One of the features of foundation degrees (FDs) is the incorporation of work-based learning (WBL) into the curriculum. WBL is seen as an important part of vocational programmes and is described by Foundation Degrees Forward (FDF) as a potentially radical approach to connecting work with learning. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), in its benchmark for FDs, stated that WBL is an integral part of FDs that enables learners to take appropriate roles in the workplace in order to learn and apply skills they have learned on the programme. This paper presents findings of a large evaluation study of the development and delivery of FDs at Kingston University in south-west London, UK. As part of this evaluation data were sought from FD course directors and from students about WBL in their particular programmes. Findings from the evaluation showed variation in course directors' and students' understanding of WBL with emphasis on ‘work-based’ and little emphasis on ‘learning’. As a result, a variety of diverse models of WBL are being used. The findings from this evaluative study are compared with the literature on models and definitions of WBL, as well as the literature on how students on vocational programmes learn. Conclusions are drawn about the use of WBL in vocationally-orientated programmes, the consequences of mixed understandings and interpretations of WBL, and a pedagogy of WBL is proposed. © 2009 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

Cultural-historical activity theory, an outcrop of socio-psychological approaches toward human development, has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past two decades but has yet to be appropriated into science education to any large extent. In part, the difficulties Western scholars have had in adopting this framework arise from its ontology, which is materialist dialectical and, hence, does not allow easy absorption into non-dialectical (classical logical) thinking underlying much of Western scholarship. Cultural-historical activity theory has tremendous potential because it sublates traditional dichotomies in everyday teaching-learning situations including individual/collective, body/mind, intra-/inter-psychological, cognitive/emotive and psychological/sociological. In this contribution, we not only review the existing literature that uses or develops this non-dualistic approach, but also articulate an intelligible explication of the theory that is more accessible to Western scholars and describe possible future curriculum work and research in science education as an expression of the fruitfulness of the theory. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.