Studying Similarities and Differences in Higher Education Organisations based on their Websites – Comparative Methodological Approaches and Research Potential

This article discusses the possible ways in which visual research methodologies can be extended and applied to study similarities and differences in higher education institutions (and systems) in the context of the visual and digital turn in social science methodologies. The article focuses on the methodological potential of the institutional website analysis as a fruitful approach in comparative higher education research. The article futher focuses on two specific comparative methodological issues: different purposes of comparisons and different organisational aspects which can be compared. The review of the current state of research based on university websites found that the analyses are largely cross-sectional and focused on issues related to institutional identities and positioning of individual self-identities towards institutions as well as on representations of different types of students. Organisational aspects of structure and hierarchies, disciplinary differences, leadership and management cultures, organisational aesthetics as well studies which focus on the representation of non-student groups of university members, are rare and represent potential research frontiers. Most of the reviewed articles are guided by linear causal explanation logic, while other comparative purposes like a better description, critique and provision of alternative explanations are less present and potentially could lead to a better understanding of higher education

Exploration of Texas Public University Education Web Pages Accessibility

Background: In the past twenty years, the Internet has revolutionized daily lives by making varied types of information freely available. Because of this technological revolution, colleges and universities have been forced to rethink the information they provide on their websites for prospective and current students as well as alumni. However, many of these websites have accessibility and usability issues, especially for site visitors with disabilities. Universities that receive federal financial aid are required to make reasonable accommodations to provide accessible content on the web, and non-compliance can result in barriers for people with disabilities and investigations by the Office of Civil Rights. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore accessibility of web pages of colleges of education and teacher education programs of public universities in the state of Texas as determined by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Methods: The sample consisted of 26 public universities in Texas who had a college of education and a teacher education program and whose enrollment ranked in the top 70%, based on the number of candidates who completed teacher education program requirements in 2017. During the fall of 2019, the researcher evaluated representative pages from the college of education and teacher education programs at each selected university for a total of 52 web pages. Data was collected using the automated web accessibility and readability evaluation tools SortSite and Readable. The data included WCAG 2.0 recommended accessibility guideline success criteria and reading levels for each page. Data were analyzed using SPSS to describe the web accessibility using multiple guideline variables. Results: The web pages of colleges of education and teacher education programs of public universities contained accessibility errors. Guideline 2.3, designing pages in a manner that does not induce seizures, passed on all of the pages scanned. Guideline 4.1, maximizing compatibility with user agents such as assistive technology, failed the most scans (88% of the pages). Low passing scores were also present on two WCAG 2.0 guidelines, resulting in web page content that may present perception and operability barriers to learners. Paired samples t tests suggested that the college of education and teacher education web pages did not differ significantly in pass rates for each of the 12 WCAG 2.0 success criteria. Readability indicators, both Flesch Kincaid Grade Level and rating, showed no significant difference between teacher education pages and college of education pages. Conclusion: Overall, the college of education and teacher education web pages have similar accessibility levels. One guideline consistently failed, resulting in pages that are not robust, or accessible by user agents and assistive technologies. Learners using assistive technology, different browsers and mobile devices may not be able to understand, view or use the web pages. Findings from this study provide information that university personnel can use to improve the web experience for individuals that visit their sites and address web page non-compliance issues causing learning information access barriers for students.Curriculum and Instruction, Department o

Adaptación de entornos virtuales de aprendizaje a las preferencias y necesidades personales del estudiante

La evolución de la sociedad no incide de igual manera en todas las personas, sino que se focaliza en el grupo de personas mayoritario, aquellas sin diferentes capacidades funcionales, produciendo una diferencia entre los distintos colectivos sociales que en términos de tecnología es denominada brecha digital. El acceso igualitario a los servicios ofrecidos a la sociedad se consigue mediante la transformación de estos, en servicios accesibles para todas las personas. El principal objetivo de esta tesis es la contribución a la investigación en el desarrollo de la accesibilidad en el ámbito de la educación virtual. El procedimiento seguido ha sido la aplicación de los estándares ISO/IEC 24751 e IMS AFA 3.0 a la elaboración de un modelo de adaptación de entornos virtuales de aprendizaje, que establece pautas básicas para convertir de forma eficaz sistemas de gestión de aprendizaje en entornos accesibles a personas con capacidades diferentes, y su validación mediante el desarrollo de un prototipo. El trabajo se ha realizado en cinco etapas (recogida de datos, delineación de las pautas básicas del modelo, aplicación a un prototipo de plataforma educativa, evaluación de su efectividad y estimación de su utilidad y facilidad de uso), que han sido necesarias para garantizar un modelo efectivo que proporcione ámbitos educativos virtuales fáciles de usar. De estas fases se han derivado tres artículos que han sido publicados en revistas de impacto. El primer artículo especifica las directrices fundamentales del modelo, extraídas de los estándares internacionales ISO/IEC 24751 e IMS AFA 3.0, que guían el proceso y describen las pautas necesarias concebidas para asegurar la efectividad y la calidad requerida por todo sistema y por los estándares estudiados. El artículo también muestra la aplicación de este modelo a un prototipo de plataforma de aprendizaje detallando las peculiaridades que le confieren características como robustez, portabilidad, escalabilidad, eficiencia y reutilización. El segundo artículo tiene como objetivo comprobar la efectividad de la herramienta desarrollada, mediante la evaluación del rendimiento de aprendizaje de grupos de estudiantes con diferentes capacidades al usar la aplicación. La evaluación se realizó mediante la comparación de un pre-test antes de la adaptación y un post-test después de esta. El tercer artículo investiga la facilidad de uso del sistema y la actitud de los estudiantes frente a su utilidad, para verificar su usabilidad y detectar los puntos que puedan mejorarse en futuros trabajos.Citizens are not guaranteed equal access to education despite the evolution of services and information technology. People with different capabilities have not been given rights to virtual education, and there is a digital divide between individuals with functional capabilities and those with limitations such as hearing or seeing problems. The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to research on the development of accessibility in the field of virtual education. The procedure followed was the application of ISO/IEC 24751 and IMS AFA 3.0 standards to the development of a model for adapting virtual learning environments that establishes basic guidelines for effectively converting learning management systems into environments accessible to people with different capabilities and its validation through the creation of a prototype. The work was carried out in five phases (data collection, outlining the basic guidelines of the model, application of guidelines to a prototype educational platform, evaluation of its effectiveness and estimation of its usefulness and ease of use), necessary to guarantee an effective model that provides user-friendly virtual educational environments. These phases have resulted in three articles that have been published in high impact journals. The first article specifies the fundamental guidelines of the model extracted from international standards (ISO/IEC 24751 and IMS AFA 3.0), which guide the process and describes the necessary guiding principles designed to ensure the effectiveness and quality required by any system and by the standards studied. The article also shows the application of this model to a prototype learning platform detailing the properties that give it characteristics such as robustness, portability, scalability, efficiency and reusability. The second article aims to test the effectiveness of the developed tool by evaluating the learning performance of groups of students with different capabilities when using the application. The evaluation was performed by comparing a pre-test before the adaptation and a post-test after it. The third article investigates the ease of use of the system and the students’ attitude towards its usefulness to verify its usability and detect points that can be improved in future work

Luonnollisen kielen käsittelyn menetelmät sanojen samankaltaisuuden mittaamisessa

An artificial intelligence application considered in this thesis was harnessed to extract competencies from job descriptions and higher education curricula written in natural language. Using these extracted competencies, the application is able to visualize the skills supply of the schools and the skills demand of the labor market. However, to understand natural language, computer must learn to evaluate the relatedness between words. The aim of the thesis is to propose the best methods for open text data mining and measuring the semantic similarity and relatedness between words. Different words can have similar meanings in natural language. The computer can learn the relatedness between words mainly by two different methods. We can construct an ontology from the studied domain, which models the concepts of the domain as well as the relations between them. The ontology can be considered as a directed graph. The nodes are the concepts of the domain and the edges between the nodes describe their relations. The semantic similarity between the concepts can be computed based on the distance and the strength of the relations between them. The other way to measure the word relatedness is based on statistical language models. The model learns the similarity between words relying on their probability distribution in large corpora. The words appearing in similar contexts, i.e., surrounded by similar words, tend to have similar meanings. The words are often represented as continuous distributed word vectors, each dimension representing some feature of the word. The feature can be either semantic, syntactic or morphological. However, the feature is latent, and usually not under understandable to a human. If the angle between the word vectors in the feature space is small, the words share same features and hence are similar. The study was conducted by reviewing available literature and implementing a web scraper for retrieving open text data from the web. The scraped data was fed into the AI application, which extracted the skills from the data and visualized the result in semantic maps