Whose domain and whose ontology?:Preserving human radical reflexivity over the efficiency of automatically generated feedback alone

In this chapter, we challenge an increase in the uncritical application of algorithmic processes for providing automatically generated feedback for students, within a neoliberal framing of contemporary higher education. Initially, we discuss our concerns alongside networked learning principles, which developed as a critical pedagogical response to new online learning programmes and platforms. These principles now overlap too, with the notion that we are living in ‘postdigital’ times, where automatically generated feedback never stands alone, but is contested and supplemented by physical encounters and human feedback. First, we make observations on the e-marking platform Turnitin, alongside other rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. When generic (but power-laden) maps are incorporated into both student and staff ‘perceived’ spaces through AI, we surface the aspects of feedback that risk being lost. Second, we draw on autoethnographic understandings of our own lived experience of performing radically reflexive feedback within a Master’s in Education programme. A radically reflexive form of feedback may not follow a pre-defined map, but it does offer a vehicle to restore individual student and staff voices and critical self-navigation of both physical and virtual learning spaces. This needs to be preserved in the ongoing shaping of the contemporary ‘postdigital’ university

Optimal tolerance regions for future regression vector and residual sum of squares of multiple regression model with multivariate spherically contoured errors

This paper considers multiple regression model with multivariate spherically symmetric errors to determine optimal β-expectation tolerance regions for the future regression vector (FRV) and future residual sum of squares (FRSS) by using the prediction distributions of some appropriate functions of future responses. The prediction distribution of the FRV, conditional on the observed responses, is multivariate Student-t distribution. Similarly, the prediction distribution of the FRSS is a beta distribution. The optimal β-expectation tolerance regions for the FRV and FRSS have been obtained based on the F -distribution and beta distribution, respectively. The results in this paper are applicable for multiple regression model with normal and Student-t errors

Field of Higher Education Research, Africa

Initiated and funded by international organisations and non-African funders, the field of African HE research was largely shaped outside the continent over the past five decades. A bibliographic search carried out for this project using Scopus, Goggle Scholar and AJOL (African Journals Online) revealed that with the exception of South Africa, the institutionalisation of HER in African universities did not begin until the late 1990s despite growing numbers of publications, reports and pamphlets on the subject from the 1980s. Our focus in this chapter is on this process of institutionalisation and development of a field on the continent. Research produced outside Africa is also reported, but only for its structuring impact on HER on the continent

Challenges and trends in comparative higher education: an editorial

[Introduction] International comparative higher education research has proliferated since its institutionalization as an interdisciplinary field in the 1960s and 1970s (Jarausch 1985) and has gained special momentum in the 1990s (Teichler 1996). On the one hand, the benefits of comparative research approaches in international higher education have been repeatedly emphasized (Altbach and Kelly 1985; Teichler 1996; Rhoades 2001). These include, for example, increasing the capacity to generalize about a greater number of units under analysis, the capacity of a systematic comparison to illuminate the dynamics of a particular system better than a single-system study as well as highlighting knowledge gaps. On the other hand, methodological debates about comparing higher education internationally and how best to compare them emerged hand-in-hand with the field’s growth in popularity. Although the logic of international comparative research does not differ from research undertaken just within one country (Teichler 1996; Goedebuure and Van Vught 1996), some problems are posed in an especially complicated and intractable fashion (Hantrais 2009; Smelser 1976/2013), because of the focus on units that are dissimilar as well as similar (to be comparable). This poses specific challenges to international comparative research. [Continues, please see the article]nonPeerReviewe

Proposal for Using a Studio Format to Enhance Institutional Advancement

Universities today need to become quicker on their toes. They must continually scan the environment and seize emerging opportunities – and institutional advancement must lead this effort. An unfortunate number of institutional advancement operations are ill equipped for the task at hand. Many suffer from high staff turnover and overly hierarchical systems that refl ect excessive fragmentation and compartmentalization. They inadvertently perpetuate stifl ing and unnecessary bureaucracy. Organizing advancement efforts around the metaphor of the design studio or creative workshop promises to (a) pool talent, (b) cultivate collaboration, and (c) align diverse but related interests in order to promote fruitful advancement. By shifting the way personnel and leaders conceptualize their work, institutional advancement can overcome a number of challenges that currently hinder its efforts. The Institutional Advancement Atelier described in this paper can improve advancement ’ s overall productivity and its ability to see and harness opportunities in a quickly changing environment – and increase employee satisfaction in the process