Lifelong Learning and Employability in the Danube Region Countries: Influences and Correlations

A continuous challenge for education and lifelong learning is to assist individuals in acquiring skills and knowledge for successful work life, especially after the financial crisis which influenced negatively the employment growth in all European Union countries. The paper focuses on finding correlations between employability and lifelong learning in the Danube Region countries of the European Union and more explicitly in the ex-communist ones of this region. As research instruments, two online questionnaires were built based on a thorough literature review and a set of structured interviews and filled in by 390 IT students and 55 IT professors. The surveys’ results revealed a clear positive correlation between the level of education and the opinion about the importance of obtaining a job as a result of the educational endeavors. A special attention in the survey was given to social networks, which were acknowledged as modern facilitators of lifelong learning activities. The conclusions of the current study are particularly important in the Romanian context, as the employment rate of recent graduates is in a decreasing trend, but also for all the Danube Region ex-communist countries, which have to boost their employment rates as well, to assure their economical growth. Identification of factors stimulating employment of young people according with their education contributes at the sustainable economic growth of these countries, at the growth of graduates insertion in the labor market and at the diminution of labor migration

Simulation-Based E-Learning Framework for Entrepreneurship Education and Training

The paper proposes an e-Learning framework in entrepreneurship. The framework has three main components, for identification the business opportunities, for developing business scenarios and for risk analysis. A common database assures the components integration. The main components of this framework are already available; the main challenging for those interested in using them is to design an integrated flow of activities, adapted with their curricula and other educational settings. The originality of the approach is that the framework is domain independent and uses advanced IT technologies, such as recommendation algorithms, agent-based simulations and extended graphical support. Using this e-learning framework, the students can learn how to choose relevant characteristics/aspects for a type of business and how important is each of them according specific criteria; how to set realistic values for different characteristics/aspects of the business, how a business scenario can be changed in order to fit better to the business context and how to assess/evaluate business scenarios

Professor Mulvaney and student applying rubber latex solution in Shelter 6, Fromm's Landing, South Australia 1963 [transparency]

Title from acquisition documentation.; Inscriptions: "Fromm's 6 1963. Latex application"--In ink on mount.; Part of the collection: Professor John Mulvaney's slide collection of archaeological excavations at Fromm's Landing, South Australia; "Fromm's Shelter 6, 1963. Mulvaney (and unknown Adelaide geography student) painting on the rubber latex section. The student holds a spray, which sprayed on the dry sand helped keep it intact while I then painted the latex with a brush ... The left-hand long latex is on display in the National Museum of Victoria. The small right hand latex produced the evidence for the flood. Dr R. Tindale, Geography, Uni of Adelaide took it for use in the dept. "--Caption supplied by donor.; Also available in electronic version via the Internet at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4256834