Camino de Santiago

Join us for a walk on the Camino de Santiago, a series of ancient European paths leading to a stunning cathedral in Santiago, Spain. We’ll talk about the literal and figurative highs and lows of our 500-mile journey

Perceptions of Professional Development Needs of Dual Credit Adjunct Faculty Instructors at a Community College in the Southwest United States

This study determined the professional development needs of dual credit adjunct faculty at a large community college in the United States. As institutions of higher education increase their reliance on adjunct faculty due to budget constraints, adjunct faculty members instruct a growing number of students. In tandem with this, more community colleges partner with local school districts to offer dual credit classes so that students can earn high school and college credit at the same time. Previous research denotes that adjunct faculty desire greater connection to and support from their institutions of higher education; however, these institutions do not consistently offer adjunct faculty these opportunities. Leadership at institutions of higher education must solicit the types of professional development desired by dual credit adjunct faculty because of the unique needs of this population of instructors. This qualitative action research case study combined data from a questionnaire, interviews, and document review from dual credit adjunct faculty members. Key findings from the study included needs for professional development related to connecting with colleagues and students as well as technology. Dual credit adjunct faculty express a desire for professional development related to their disciplines, technology, and institutional support. Professors with different years of experience need different types of professional development. Specifically, new instructors need orientation information, professors with some experience need information about student engagement, and experienced instructors want information related to building their careers. Keywords: adjunct faculty, professional development, community college, dual credi

Canals and Culture: A First Time Visit to Scandinavia

Join professor Allison Venuto for highlights of her summer trip to Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam. From hot dogs and Michelin stars to parkas and bunads, we’ll talk about what made the trip great! Discover the culture and customs of a region that consistently ranks among the happiest places on Earth. Professor Venuto is a professor of education at the Spring Creek Campus

The duration of economic expansions and recessions: more than duration dependence

One widespread idea in the business cycles literature is that the older is an expansion or contraction, the more likely it is to end. This paper tries to provide further empirical support for this idea of positive duration dependence and, at the same time, control for the effects of other factors like leading indicators, the duration of the previous phase, investment, price of oil and external influences on the duration of expansions and contractions. This Study employs a discrete-time duration model to analyse the impact of those variables on the likelihood of an expansion and contraction ending in a panel of thirteen industrial countries over the last fifty years. The evidence provided in this paper suggests that the duration of expansions and contractions is not only dependent on their actual age: the duration of expansions is also positively dependent on the behaviour of the variables in the OECD composite leading indicator and on private investment, and negatively affected by the price of oil and by the occurrence of a peak in the US business cycle; the duration of a contraction is negatively affected by its actual age and by the duration of the previous expansion. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

The duration of business cycle expansions and contractions: are there change-points in duration dependence?

The issue of whether the likelihood of an expansion or contraction ending is dependent on its age, i.e whether they are duration dependent, is widely addressed in the business cycles literature and evidence of positive duration dependence is found in several studies. However, there is an important issue that has not been explored in this literature yet: the presence of change-points in duration dependence. All the studies in this field depart from the assumption that the magnitude of duration dependence is the same over time. However, we conjecture that the degree of likeliness of an expansion or contraction ending as it gets older might change after a specific duration. To test for that possibility, this paper will allow for the presence of a change-point in the analysis of the duration of expansions and contractions for a group of 13 European and Non-European industrial countries over the period 1948-2009. The evidence provided by the estimation of a continuous-time Weibull duration model shows strong support for the presence of positive duration dependence, which is stronger for contractions than for expansions. Results also show that contractions have become longer over time and that their length is negatively affected by the length of the previous expansion. Most importantly, this paper provides quite interesting evidence for the presence of a change-point in duration dependence for expansions, but not for contractions. Results show that the magnitude of the duration dependence parameter decreases significantly when an expansion surpasses 10 years of duration. In particular, evidence of positive duration dependence is no longer found when an expansion surpasses that threshold.COMPETE; QREN; FEDER; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT