Compensation Criteria In Higher Education In Israel And Elsewhere: Evaluation Of Research And Teaching Outcomes

Teachers in academia are usually not required to have teacher training but must often be evaluated by their students who expect them to have much better teaching qualifications than their high school teachers. However, teachers in elementary and high schools are required to go through several years of teacher training, resulting in a teaching certificate, which is usually mandatory in the secondary school system.  This anomaly causes great tension in colleges and universities and often results in pressure to "improve" teaching evaluation in regard to academic level. In many countries, a doctorate degree in any field automatically allows its holder to teach in academic institutions because the students are expected to learn on their own while the professor is the expert responsible for helping with complicated questions. These discrepancies often hamper the advances of higher education.   This paper presents the situation of teaching in higher education in selected countries, while presenting various paradigms for improving the state of teaching in higher education. The aim is to study the methodologies used to assess the quality of teaching in higher education systems, in general, and in Israel, specifically

Location of Emergency Treatment Sites after Earthquake using Hybrid Simulation

A mass-casualty natural disaster such as an earthquake is a rare, surprising event that is usually characterized by chaos and a lack of information, resulting in an overload of casualties in hospitals. Thus, it is very important to refer minor and moderately-injured casualties, that are the majority of casualties and whose injuries are usually not life threatening, to ad hoc care facilities such as Emergency Treatment Sites (ETSs). These facilities support the efficient use of health resources and reduce the burden on permanent healthcare facilities. In our study, a hybrid simulation model, based on a combination of discrete events and an agent-based simulation, provides a solution to the uncertainty of positioning temporary treatment sites. The simulation methodology used compares between "rigid" and "flexible" operating concepts of ETSs (main vs. main+minor ETSs) and found the "flexible" concept to be more efficient in terms of the average walking distance and number of casualties treated in the disaster area

The Price of Success: Some Consequences of Increased Access to Higher Education in Israel

Access to higher education in general, and to a bachelor’s degree in particular, constitutes a major issue on the agendas of higher education systems in recent years. The end of WWII marked the global transition to higher education institutions of a democratic, open nature, and in most western countries, including Israel, the accelerated pace of this transformation in the twentieth century led to the massification of the bachelor’s degree. In the final quarter of the twentieth century, Israel’s Planning and Budgeting Committee conceived of the system of higher education as consisting of two levels: universities, with a focus on research and graduate studies, and colleges with a focus on undergraduate studies, which would serve as instruments of equality and social justice for students from the periphery through access to higher education. However, increased access affected both the new colleges and the longstanding universities, which competed among themselves, and gradually obliterated the differences between them. In this paper we discuss two specific aspects of this transformation and their implications: whether the Israeli Council of Higher Education’s major goal of increased access has been achieved and the effects of increased access to bachelor’s degree programs on the expansion of master’s degree programs.Key words: Higher education; Bachelor’s degree; Massification; Equality; Justice; PeripheryRésumé L’accès à l’enseignement supérieur en général, et à un diplôme de baccalauréat, en particulier, constitue un enjeu majeur dans les agendas des systèmes d’enseignement supérieur ces dernières années. La fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale a marqué la transition mondiale vers les établissements d’enseignement supérieur d’une société démocratique, la nature ouverte, et dans la plupart des pays occidentaux, y compris Israël, l’accélération du rythme de cette transformation dans le XXe siècle a conduit à la massification du diplôme de baccalauréat. Dans le dernier quart du XXe siècle, de la planification d’Israël et du Comité du budget a conçu le système d’enseignement supérieur comme étant composée de deux niveaux: les universités, avec un accent sur la recherche et aux études supérieures, et les collèges avec un accent sur les études de premier cycle, qui serviraient comme des instruments de l’égalité et la justice sociale pour les étudiants de la périphérie à travers l’accès à l’enseignement supérieur. Toutefois, l’accès accru affecté à la fois les nouveaux collèges et les universités de longue date, qui se disputent entre eux, et peu à peu effacé les différences entre eux. Dans cet article, nous discutons de deux aspects particuliers de cette transformation et de leurs implications: si le Conseil israélien de l’objectif majeur de l’enseignement supérieur de l’accès accru a été réalisé et les effets d’un accès accru aux programmes de baccalauréat sur l’expansion des programmes de maîtrise.Mots clés: L’enseignement supérieur; Baccalauréat; La massification; L’égalité; La justice; à la périphéri

Sparse, continuous policy representations for uniform online bin packing via regression of interpolants

Online bin packing is a classic optimisation problem, widely tackled by heuristic methods. In addition to human-designed heuristic packing policies (e.g. first- or best- fit), there has been interest over the last decade in the automatic generation of policies. One of the main limitations of some previously-used policy representations is the trade-off between locality and granularity in the associated search space. In this article, we adopt an interpolation-based representation which has the jointly-desirable properties of being sparse and continuous (i.e. exhibits good genotype-to-phenotype locality). In contrast to previous approaches, the policy space is searchable via real-valued optimization methods. Packing policies using five different interpolation methods are comprehensively compared against a range of existing methods from the literature, and it is determined that the proposed method scales to larger instances than those in the literature

Sustainable educational supply chain performance measurement through DEA and Differential Evolution: a case on Indian HEI

Data envelopment analysis or DEA methodology is employed for assessing the relative efficiency of different homogeneous units. Through DEA one can analyze the areas which need more attention and can suggest measures for improving the performance of different sectors. Through this article, the authors have tried to analyze the relative efficiency of IITR (The Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee), a higher educational institute (HEI) in India. The efficiency of nineteen academic departments of IIT Roorkee is measured with respect to teaching and research. The novlty of the paper is twofold (1) the authiors have considered the environmental aspects (sustainability criteria) while measuring efficiency (2) Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is employed in accordance with DEA on the fractional model generated for calculating efficiency

Drivers of Performance

This chapter uses the annual school census to analyze differences in primary school performances across regions. Our results, obtained from a stochastic frontier analysis, suggest that differences in efficiency explain only part of the observed variation, while resource availability is the most important driver of performance differences. In addition to this, we note that resources are distributed quite unevenly among regions and schools. By distributing more school inputs, or distributing existing inputs more equally to the benefit of underserved schools, performance can be expected to go up

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions