Student Perceptions of Online Courses for School Administrators

Online courses are the fastest growing student enrollment at the university level during the last decade. Between the time period 2003-2009, the number of students who had taken online courses doubled to 3.9 million which outpaced the growth in traditional college settings by a 12% margin (Mashable/Tech,2010). However, this online programming movement still remains in its early stages of development. Thus, faculty members and designers of online education need to know more about online courses. Momin (2003) stated that this growth, in online education, has been accompanied by increased questions about the effectiveness of online courses. More research needs to be conducted regarding how student experiences differ in online course environments and how outcomes are developed and measured. Specifically, faculty members and administrators need to understand how students perceive online education and courses because these perceptions and attitudes can be a direct link to student motivation and learning. Koohang and Durante (2003) further suggest that elements of e-learning and student motivation are critical

Filling the Gaps in Civil Society The Role of the Catholic Church in Latin American Democratization

In this paper, we seek to draw lessons about the roles that religious institutions can play in promoting democracy in deeply divided societies by examining the experience of the Catholic Church in Latin America. We focus on the cases of Chile and El Salvador, two countries where the Catholic Church played a decisive role in advancing democracy after autocratic military rule. These two cases illustrate where theology and action productively promoted social change in highly conflictual societies. We note challenges to democracy in the region, but also new opportunities in the era of the first Latin American pope, Francis

Concentrated Poverty Increased in Both Rural and Urban Areas Since 2000, Reversing Declines in the 1990s

In this brief, authors Brian Thiede, Hyojung Kim, and Matthew Valasik discuss changes in poverty levels among U.S. counties using data from the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census and the 2005–2009 and 2011-2015 American Community Surveys. They report that the share of rural counties with high poverty rates (20 percent or more) increased from 20.6 percent in 2000 to 32.5 percent in the aggregate 2011–2015 data, and the share of high-poverty urban counties increased from 6.7 to 15.6 percent. The share of the population living in these high-poverty counties nearly doubled in both rural and urban areas during this period. Substantial increases in concentrated poverty occurred in rural areas both before and after the Great Recession, but increases in urban areas primarily occurred in years during and after the downturn. In rural areas, increases in concentrated poverty were greatest among micropolitan counties with small cities, which had historically been characterized by lower poverty rates than more sparsely populated and isolated areas. Increases in the population exposed to concentrated poverty were greater among the rural non-Hispanic white and black populations than among rural Hispanics. The authors conclude that the overall resurgence of concentrated poverty since 2000 should be of concern to policy makers and other stakeholders since areas with very high poverty rates face many social, economic, and health challenges

Sharp entrywise perturbation bounds for Markov chains

For many Markov chains of practical interest, the invariant distribution is extremely sensitive to perturbations of some entries of the transition matrix, but insensitive to others; we give an example of such a chain, motivated by a problem in computational statistical physics. We have derived perturbation bounds on the relative error of the invariant distribution that reveal these variations in sensitivity. Our bounds are sharp, we do not impose any structural assumptions on the transition matrix or on the perturbation, and computing the bounds has the same complexity as computing the invariant distribution or computing other bounds in the literature. Moreover, our bounds have a simple interpretation in terms of hitting times, which can be used to draw intuitive but rigorous conclusions about the sensitivity of a chain to various types of perturbations

Passkontrolle bei Vertragsabschluss: Zur Kausalität zwischen „Ausrichten“ und Vertragsschluss des Verbrauchers nach Art 15 Abs 1 lit c EuGVVO

Die Diskussion um das Internationale Verbraucherschutzrecht flammt seit der Schaffung des Verbrauchergerichtsstands im Internationalen Zivilverfahrensrecht und den Verbraucherschutzregeln der Rom I-VO immer wieder auf. Nachdem in der Vergangenheit der Verbraucherschutz teilweise hintangehalten wurde und der EuGH auf eine strikte Auslegung pochte, in der Zwischenzeit ein Mittelweg zwischen den Interessen der Unternehmer und Verbraucher gesucht wurde, scheint das Pendel nunmehr wieder in die andere Richtung auszuschlagen