Context Of Teaching In Higher Education Research Articles

Development and psychometric study to the Scale of Organizational Sources of Stress on Teaching in Higher Education

Working environments given the great instability and turbulence of modern times, have become more demanding and stressful for most workers. Specifically in higher education teaching context this phenomenon is alarmingly increasing (Winefield, 2000). For this reason, we consider important to acknowledge the potential sources of stress in specific working contexts, given the role that this knowledge might have on the assumption of preventive primary and secondary intervention measures on occupational stress, which are themselves the most efficient ones (Lamontagne, Keegel, Louie, Ostry, & Landsbergis, 2007).The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument and carry out a preliminary psychometric study to the Scale of Organizational Sources of Stress on Teaching in Higher Education. We based the development of the scale on literature review and on the results of content analysis of individual interviews to higher education academics. Initially composed by 28 items, the scale was applied to 236 academics of public and private higher education organizations (university and polytechnic) in Oporto. After the exploratory factor analysis and the internal consistency analysis of the factors extracted, which collectively explain 55,4% of total variance, the scale was composed by 20 items grouped into four factors: characteristics of the job (α = .87), organizational climate (α = .85), career development (α = .78) and working conditions (α = .74). The final factors structure reveals a discriminating power between the factors, which leads us to believe that the scale is able to differentiate the various sources of stress in this type of work contexts. Studies to validate the scale nationwide are now a priority.

Second Life, First Experiences:Using VirtualWorlds in Teacher Education

Innovating in a higher education teaching context is never a straightforward matter. There are many factors influencing how, what, and when we teach, and the students’ experiences of these things. This is especially so in the context of pre-service teacher education, forever evolving in response to rapidly changing technological, political and socio-cultural landscapes. In this paper we relate and reflect on the innovation of utilising the 3D immersive virtual world of Second Life in two secondary education units of study. We discuss and interrogate our own and our students’ experiences when we used Second Life to teach in during the first unit, and to teach about in the second.

An experimental study of the inclusion of technology in higher education

AbstractThis article presents an experimental study of the inclusion of technology in a higher education teaching context that aims at transforming the educational process by making it both more effective and more attractive to students. Portable Pocket PC devices are used to set up and run collaborative work activities in the classroom under the technologically assisted supervision of the professor. The results lead to various findings regarding the technology inclusion process, such as the importance of the underlying educational model and the instruments that provide the technology, and allow us to draw certain conclusions relating to the educational process, in particular that the continued use of ICTs leads to improvements in student performance. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 17: 100–107, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae20188