A Comparative Study of National Infrastructures for Digital (Open) Educational Resources in Higher Education

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project “Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures–EduArc”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries’ political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country’s context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face

Attracting tertiary international students to the EHEA: Does continent of origin matter?

Item does not contain fulltextThe rise of international students has generated significant attention around the world including in the EHEA which has set out to increase international student mobility. In this paper we analyze patterns in the mobility of international students using the temporal framework developed by Choudaha [1]. We also look at variation within the EHEA and, more importantly, variation in the sending countries. The aim of this paper is therefore to increase our understanding of patterns in International student Mobility by focusing on the region of origin of students. By analyzing data made available by the UNESCO institute of statistics we uncovered that there are indeed substantial differences when looking at both host and countries. The implications of these findings are discussed with regards to effectively attracting and retaining international students.International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (Washington D.C., USA, July 24-28, 2019

18F-FDG-PET/CT in relapsed multiple myeloma: Are prognostic thresholds different from first-line therapy?

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:sec> <jats:title>Purpose</jats:title> <jats:p>While <jats:sup>18</jats:sup>F-FDG PET/CT yields valuable prognostic information for patients in first-line therapy of multiple myeloma (MM), its prognostic relevance in relapse is not established. Available studies of relapsed MM describe prognostic thresholds for frequently used PET/CT parameters that are significantly higher than those identified in the first-line setting. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prognostic role of PET/CT in relapsed MM, based on parameters used in the first-line setting.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Methods</jats:title> <jats:p>Our retrospective study included 36 patients with MM who had received autologous or allogeneic stem cell transplantation, suffered at least one relapse, and underwent FDG-PET/CT at relapse. Number of focal bone lesions (FL), maximal standardised uptake value (SUVmax), and presence of PET-positive extramedullary lesions (EMD) were analysed.</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Results</jats:title> <jats:p>For the number of FLs, the prognostic value was demonstrated with a cut-off of > 3 (median OS 3.8 months vs. not reached, p = 0.003). Median OS of patients with SUVmax ≤ 4 was not reached, while it was 3.9 months in patients with SUVmax > 4 (p = 0.014). Presence of EMD was a significant prognostic parameter too, with median OS of 3.6 months versus not reached (p = 0.004). The above-mentioned parameters showed prognostic significance for PFS as well. Combination of higher ISS stage and PET/CT parameters identified patients with particularly short OS (3.7 months vs. not reached, p < 0.001) and PFS (3.6 vs. 11.7 months p < 0.001).</jats:p> </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Conclusion</jats:title> <jats:p>The PET/CT parameters SUVmax > 4, nFL > 3, and presence of EMD identify patients with poor prognosis not only in the first-line setting but also in relapsed MM. </jats:p> </jats:sec&gt

A Photonic Thermalization Gap In Disordered Lattices

The formation of gaps - forbidden ranges in the values of a physical parameter - is common to a variety of physical systems: from energy bandgaps of electrons in periodic lattices and their analogues in photonic, phononic and plasmonic systems to pseudo-energy gaps in aperiodic quasicrystals. Here, we predict a thermalization gap for light propagating in finite disordered structures characterized by disorder-immune chiral symmetry - the appearance of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors in skew-symmetric pairs. In these systems, the span of sub-thermal photon statistics is inaccessible to input coherent light, which - once the steady state is reached - always emerges with super-thermal statistics no matter how small the disorder level. We formulate an independent constraint of the input field for the chiral symmetry to be activated and the gap to be observed. This unique feature enables a new form of photon-statistics interferometry: the deterministic tuning of photon statistics via controlled excitation symmetry breaking realized by sculpting the amplitude or phase of the input coherent field

Social Justice in Turkish Education System: Issues and Interventions

This chapter discusses the research and practice in social justice in education inTurkey. Economic, social, political, and demographic developments that createand perpetuate disparities in different societies are equally valid for Turkey.In order to capture the state of social justice in education first, Turkey’s social,demographic, and economic status of the country was discussed. Turkey has arelatively young population, which increases the demand for public education.The key figures on the schooling rates in Turkey suggest that Turkey has beenimproving its performance in providing access to school to its young population.However, economic performance of the country suggest that significant part ofpopulation suffers from inequality in income distribution. Social, economic, anddemographic issues as well as the key issues in the structure of education systemin Turkey give way to quality of education issue in Turkey. Particularly economic disparities contribute largely to social justice issues in education. The issues causedby the economic structures are perpetuated by the centralized education system. It isargued that the centralized education of Turkey and functionalist sociology exist ina symbiosis, which leads to several false assumptions about developing anddelivering educational services in the country. Assuming that the central authorityis able to neutralize the differences across the schools so that the students attendingany school in the system have access to the elements of education of the samequality level; assuming that the students attending any school have the samecapacity to benefit from educational provisions; and assuming that school improvementmodels can be applied in the same way to every school setting largely lead toignoring the social, political, and economic disparities eliminating the students’access to quality educational provisions. The equal approach deepens the deprivedstatus of the disadvantaged students. The dilemma of granting access but failing toprovide quality is related to the concepts of horizontal-vertical inequalities. On theother hand, scholarly work on social justice in education can be grouped undermacro- and micro-sociological perspectives. Research on micro-sociological perspectivein Turkey largely focus on the role of principal in mitigating the effect ofdisparities on educational attainment of the students, while research stream onmacro-sociological perspective focuses largely on impact of certain setups onstudents’ schooling. However, research in both of these streams highlights fourimportant gaps in social justice in education of Turkey. First, research gap suggeststhat scholarly work on social justice in Turkey rely extensively onWestern conceptsand terminology. The policy gap suggests that Turkey lacks a broad social justice ineducational policy, which accounts on every institution in the country. The leadershipgap suggests that school principals and teachers do not have a formal roledefinition for social justice leadership. Rather, social justice behaviors of schoolleaders are motivated by personal, altruistic, or moral endeavor of the principals.Finally, the institution gap suggest that the centralized education system’s hiddenassumptions form obstacles for true social justice practices in education