This paper presents an exploratory, data-analytic investigation among groups of engineering students from two countries, Slovenia and Hong Kong, regarding their social network and learning performance. Literature review suggests social networks and peer collaborations are the major elements in team learning. Specifically, the influences of peer relationships, social networks on one another as well as on effecting learning performance of groups of engineering students taking engineering management related courses, are identified. How to achieve the optimal social networking status so as to best facilitate the team learning is still a question faced by educators or learning advocators. This project aims to explore how the students perceive their peer classmates and how they are clustered to form into teams, and how these clustering and networking explain the impacts of social network on academic performance. One important highlight based on the network analysis results of this research shows, social relationships may have direct impact onstudents team learning performance. In this paper, graphical visualization of the analysis results enables methodological prioritization of various learning motivation factors. Also, this paper attempts to demonstrate how advanced network analytic tools can be applied to study these social phenomena, which has not been discussed previously.
COBISS.SI-ID: 13803681
We welcome digital natives to our university assuming they are competent computer and internet users. However, testing their computer skills at the beginning of the course revealed that they are not as highly skilled as was initially expected. The majority of students had surprisingly never heard of the massive open online courses that have been challenging higher education in recent years. Moreover, a lot of students do not use freely accessible learning resources on the web. Collecting data from Eurostat statistics raises an interesting issue - more and more EU households are getting broadband internet access and internet penetration is not only following users that have accessed the internet once in the last 3 months, but users that access the internet daily. It would be expected that individuals, especially those aged under 30, are highly computer and internet literate, but the data analysis revealed otherwise. Not only students included in the research presented in the empirical part of this paper, but also an average young internet user of one of the 28 EU countries. Using Facebook and the first Google search result is not enough anymore.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537745348
Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are important for new wealth creation and economic development. Yet insufficient attention has been paid in entrepreneurship research to psychological characteristics such as the big five personality characteristics. In this study, we address this issue by investigating the psychological determinants of real-life entrepreneurial start-up decisions and intentions by contrasting entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs as regards the big five personality factors. We develop hypotheses linking the big five personality factors (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) with individual entrepreneurial activities. In addition, we investigate gender influences on the level of and the moderation effect on the personality-entrepreneurship relationship. Using data collected via face-to-face structured interviews with 546 individuals from Slovenia, we tested these hypotheses using MANOVA. As the findings of this study indicate, the openness personality factor may be the most important of the five factors for differentiating real-life entrepreneurs from other people. In addition, people who have no intention of starting up their own firms – non-entrepreneurs – tend to score lower on extraversion and somewhat higher on agreeableness than other people. Contrary to the expectations, gender was not found to be a moderator in the personality-entrepreneurship relationship.
COBISS.SI-ID: 22632678
Higher education institutions (HEIs, are ideally positioned to make a critical contribution to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through their core academic functions of research and teaching. However, while sustainability research has accelerated in recent years, curriculum development has been limited in scope and impact, due to the complexities of ESD when applied within the existing academic structures and processes of HEIs. The field of ESD has the strategic aim of reorienting entire educational systems, which in HEIs means the challenging goal of achieving large-scale shifts of curriculum priorities, policy and pedagogy. The concept of ESD focuses on achieving human wellbeing and quality of life, pursued through the maintenance, care and equitable use of natural and cultural resources. Critical pedagogies oriented to futures and systems thinking, participatory and experiential learning, critical thinking, partnership working and values reflection, are all widely used in ESD. Two Slovenian cases of ESD good practice include one or more of the following innovative pedagogical approaches: changes to formal curriculum development processes and/or frameworks; actions to improve the graduate profile and student learning experiences; strategic enhancement activities to improve teaching and learning practice.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21570056
The global economic crisis after 2008 had a significant impact on the higher education systems of countries around the world, because its effects have rapidly expanded and significant impact on the economy and virtually all other sectors. The research includes the study of the effects of the global economic crisis on the (public) funding of the universities in selected European countries. Since the shape and structure of the higher education in each country are different, therefore the effects of the economic crisis are different.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38260229