Inter-institutional Collaboration Research Articles

Enhancing internationalisation through inter-institutional collaboration

Although internationalisation has been identified as a key transformative factor of higher education at the beginning of the 21st century and is firmly embedded in most institutional missions, there is growing concern amongst educators that internationalisation is being devalued and that the progress of its implementation has stalled. One particularly worrying aspect is a rather limited, predominantly instrumental implementation of internationalisation by institutions subsumed by neoliberal ideologies, economics and rankings, which prioritises international student recruitment over enhancing intercultural understanding, curricula and students’ personal development. Responding to calls to re-orient institutional missions, this reflective essay seeks to stimulate a discussion of how aspirations of socially responsible internationalisation (internationalism) and learning for global citizenship may be reclaimed. Drawing on selected cases from the field of spatial planning, the author suggests that interinstitutional collaboration and partnerships could be a valid means to support (explicitly or implicitly) socially responsible internationalisation while also covering institutional performance targets. Cases are interrogated for their rationale (aims, institutional arrangements, focus) to gain an understanding of how they address various aspects of internationalisation and to draw lessons for wider adoption.

Resective-reconstructive treatment of abnormally invasive placenta: Inter Institutional Collaboration by telemedicine (eHealth)

Introduction: Resective-reconstructive treatment of an abnormally invasive placenta, also known as conservative surgical management, allows a comprehensive treatment of the pathology in only one surgery; however, this alternative is not generally included in international consensus, as it requires specific training. Here, we report our experience of this type of treatment and its plausibility after training facilitated by interinstitutional collaboration via telemedicine.Materials and methods: A total of 48 women who were diagnosed with abnormally invasive placenta, before and after changes due to the resection-reconstruction protocol were included in the study.Results: In total, 14 conservative reconstructive procedures were performed with outcomes of a lower rate of bleeding, reduced transfusions and complications, and a shorter duration of hospitalization than women with hysterectomy.Conclusion: Conservative surgical management is a safe alternative when implemented at specialized centers by trained groups of professionals. Interinstitutional collaboration, using appropriate telemedicine is a safe and effective alternative to enable training in resective-conservative management of abnormally invasive placenta.

When success is an orphan: informal institutional governance and the EU–Turkey deal

This article traces the role of the EU institutions in the process leading up to the EU–Turkey Action Plan and EU–Turkey Statement. The EU–Turkey deal is the proverbial ‘orphan’ in EU crises management, with none of the key actors and institutions eager to claim ownership. Yet when judged from the perspective of process management, the deal resulted from effective inter-institutional collaboration, which stands in stark contrast to the EU’s handling of the relocation schemes or the Dublin reform. Using insights from the informal governance literature, the article maps the inter-institutional network that managed this process, traces the activities within the network, and determines the effects these had on the final outcome. On an analytical level, the mechanism contains five key elements of informal institutional governance: linking, bridging, shielding, laying out the tracks and creative fixes. The conclusion reflects on the wider applicability and scope conditions of this mechanism.

Promoting social justice in teaching and learning in higher education through professional development

ABSTRACT The article analyses a national professional learning programme through a social justice lens, drawing on Fraser’s framework for social justice and Moje’s distinction between socially just pedagogy and pedagogy for social justice. The South African Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) Fellowships Programme seeks to advance inter-institutional collaboration and social justice in teaching and learning by building a cadre of senior academics as scholars, leaders and change agents in various disciplinary fields, across all South African public universities. Fraser’s framework allows evaluation of strategies used to support participation with parity; Moje’s distinction is extended to show the interface between socially just staff development and staff development for social justice. The article analyses the substantial impact on participants through Fraser’s cultural and political dimensions, and assesses the current and cumulative impact on social justice in teaching and learning through present and planned subsequent iterations of the programme.

Overt and covert: Successful strategies for building employability skills of vocational education graduates

Knowing how well higher education providers prepare learners for the working world is becoming increasingly important at all programme levels, and this is nowhere more apparent than with vocational education training. Ensuring our learners can hit the ground running and become immediately productive is essential for the relevance, and probably the survival, of New Zealand’s Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs). Yet while there is much commentary about the challenges of transitions from tertiary study into employment and the ‘employability skills gap’, there is all too little given to how this is being addressed in teaching. This paper describes the work of an inter-institutional research collaboration into current approaches being used to embed skills that enhance employability. Drawing on a number of frameworks and models, the research team selected ten core attributes: positive attitude, communication, teamwork, self-management, willingness to learn, thinking skills, resilience, innovation, entrepreneurship and cultural competence. The team then identified a range of strategies being used by highly commended teachers to enhance the ten employability skills: firstly, by observing classroom and online practices of 23 selected teachers from participating organisations; and secondly through follow-up interviews with the same teachers. The key takeaway of this research is raised awareness and intentionality of the overt and covert approaches vocational educators are using to enhance the employability of their students.

QUALITY MATTERS: INTER-INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY IMPROVEMENT FOR ONLINE COURSES

The Quality Matters (QM) project funded by FIPSE and administered by MarylandOnline (MOL) is creating a replicable inter-institutional continuous improvement model to assess, assure, and improve the quality of online courses. Designed to address statewide and national needs for credible quality assurance in online learning, the inter-institutional collaboration is an integral and essential feature of QM project organization, implementation, and impact. The project uses inter-institutional, intersegmental peer review teams as an integral part of the quality improvement process; the expansion of the peer reviewer pool to involve faculty from two- and four-year institutions beyond MOL members in peer reviews of courses is also particularly noteworthy. The QM project’s success to date indicates the viability of creating an interinstitutional collaborative process for quality improvement in online courses. Future efforts will focus on determining whether the project can build and maintain a sustainable model for the long term.

Competitive and technology intelligence to reveal the most influential authors and inter-institutional collaborations on additive manufacturing for hand orthoses

Additive manufacturing (AM) is revolutionizing the health industry, where itprovides innovative solutions for the production of personalized devices, such as hand orthoses.However, the scientific research dynamics in this topic have not yet been investigated. Thisstudy aims to fill this gap through the application of a competitive and technology intelligence(CTI) methodology enhanced by a scientometric and network map analysis. Major advances inthe fabrication of hand orthoses using AM, the presence of collaborations, and the mostinfluential authors were determined. Specifically, network map analysis, bibliographicoccurrence and bibliographic coupling were conducted on documents retrieved from Scopus andthe Web of Science (WoS), and on patents from more than 104 authorities. Results showed onlynine published patent families and 34 research articles on this topic from 2006 to 2016. Tenpapers concern static orthoses, while 24 deal with dynamic orthoses and exoskeletons. Theindegree and outdegree parameters and the betweenness centrality of these documents enabledus to determine the most cited authors and instances of collaboration (papers co-authoredbetween institutions). Dr. Paterson A. M. J. was the most influential author, with fourpublications with the highest betweenness centrality in the network (189), which accounted forthe most cited document with five citations. The institution with the most publications wasLoughborough University, with four papers, and the collaboration between affiliations was rare.These documents review important aspects of manufacturing orthoses using AM, andadditionally pay particular attention to the importance of personalised orthoses where AMcontributes. Notably, these papers focused primarily on studies for the development of amethodology for the fabrication of hand orthoses using AM, but they do not present anyapplication. This research provides insights to better understand the dynamics of research anddevelopment in the orthopaedics domain, specifically for hand orthoses.

Investigación-acción cooperativa: aprendiendo de una experiencia fallida

The aim of this article is to identify learning situations used in collaborative action research (CAR) in a rural school and a state university, based on the analysis of the strengths andchallenges of experience. From a methodological point of view, this is a case study of action research. The experience is analytically assessed by recognizing the strengths ―reciprocal recognition, appreciation of the other institutional body as a project partner with shared goals, and commitment of the inter-institutional educational actors to the students― and the challenges ―management of each institution’s internal contingencies for inter-institutional coordination, and institutional differences to distinguish intervention problems and goals. Based on the experience, the following learning situations are recognized: clarifying the goals of collaboration with reality criteria over the fair desire to achieve great transformations, and knowing the institutional administrative times and protocols that affect the inter-institutional collaboration.

Enterprise Cloud Computing Project for Connecting Higher Education Institutions: A Case Study of the UAE

The new cloud computing technology is very much in the business and economic horizon, extending its horizons to non-business sectors like education. This study is a study of the need and applicability of the fast spreading business enterprises’ external cloud computing technology, to the higher educational institution in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the educational hub of the MENA region, in terms of three premier higher educational institutions—Zayed University (ZU), Higher College of Technology (HCT), and the UAE University (UAEU) for their collaboration services for better educational services. Employing the interview method to a sample of administrators, it was found that the institutions were lacking in cloud computing (CC) resulting in delays in student services, such as inter-university transfers of students. The administrators, however, were convinced of CC technology for inter-institutional collaboration. For this, it is suggested to establish a platform of cloud computing services, with required staff training and motivation for efficient and collaboration functioning of the HEIs in the UAE, which is evolving into a global educational center. As this is not the end of the problem, there is a need for further research in the problem, such as staff exchange, and research cooperation as it is a modest but worthwhile contribution to the educational dimension of cloud computing for educational efficiency.

Croatian Highly Cited Papers

Highly cited papers are among the most commonly used indicators for measuring scientific excellence. The primary purpose of this study is to determine characteristics of highly cited papers authored or co-authored by Croatian researchers and to identify patterns of their national and cross-national collaboration. The Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection was used for collecting data. Data were filtered for the highly cited papers published in the 2008-2018 period. Half of 428 identified highly cited papers were published in only 18 journals. The distribution across subject areas showed a strong domination of the fields of physics and clinical medicine. The median number of authors per average paper was 30,5, while the same value in the case of Croatian authors was 2. Only 4% of the analysed papers were authored by Croatian researchers only. The national inter-institutional collaboration was marginal and mainly visible through joined collaboration with foreign institutions. European institutions are most frequently found among the authors' addresses. For a small country on the scientific periphery, international cooperation is a prerequisite not only for the publication of highly cited papers but also for acquiring additional research experience in mainstream scientific teams.

Experiencing Teletandem: A collaborative project to encourage students in tandem interactions

In this paper, we present findings of a semester long collaboration between two instructors: one from a Brazilian high school and the other from an American technical college. We investigated the potential of online in-tandem interactions for the enhancement of students’ second language learning. Using Action Research, we assessed the impact of the partnership and our students’ participation in two student-guided telecollaborative sessions. In this empirical qualitative study, we conducted semi-structured interviews and distributed a questionnaire to explore our students’ attitudes towards language learning and their perceived development of their fluency in the second language. The results encourage partnerships in the format of inter-institutional collaborations to promote students’ involvement in communicative tasks in Portuguese and in English. It also demonstrates how this type of telecollaborative activity promotes positive attitudes that indicate the nurturing of students’ participation and intercultural competence.

Editorial: Self-enquiry as an intrapersonal means to promoting scholarship of professional development: Our quest for new meaning making

Editorial: Self-enquiry as an intrapersonal means to promoting scholarship of professional development: Our quest for new meaning making

Biophilia and Sustainable Museum Education Practices

Museums offer significant learning experiences that contribute to sustainable societies and lifelong learning. However, museum education has historically been a field in flux, and a constant revitalization is needed. This paper examines Biophilia, created by artist and musician Björk, as a case-study to illustrate the potential of its pedagogical approach to affect sustainable museum learning practices. Biophilia inspires children to learn about sound, science, and nature through technology; it is an app-album that manifested itself in a museum context both as a concert venue and a multi-disciplinary experimental educational platform – ideal for museum learning. While the project was formally implemented in Iceland through high levels of inter-institutional collaboration, its theoretical relationship to museum education and critical pedagogy of place was overlooked. Using the Biophilia’s analogy of an ‘infectious virus’ and a futurist’s framework of creativity and play, I ask: what can the field of museum education learn from Biophilia?

Developing Pilot Interventions to Address Food Insecurity and Nutritional Needs of People Living With HIV in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Interinstitutional Approach Using Formative Research.

Food insecurity and malnutrition present challenges to HIV management, but little research has been done in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). To assess levels of food insecurity and malnutrition among people living with HIV (PLHIV) across multiple countries in LAC to inform pilot projects and policy. Through interinstitutional collaboration, we collected data on sociodemographics, household food security, anthropometry, and commonly consumed foods among adults seeking care at HIV clinics in Bolivia, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic (DR; N = 400) and used the results for pilot projects. Most PLHIV had moderate or severe household food insecurity (61% in Bolivia, 71% in Honduras, and 68% in DR). Overweight and obesity were also highly prevalent, particularly among women (41%-53% had body mass index ≥25). High body fat was also prevalent, ranging from 36% to 59%. Among salient foods, fruits and vegetables were lacking. Country-specific pilot projects incorporated locally tailored nutrition counseling with a monthly household food ration, linkage to income-generating projects, or urban gardens. Nutritional counseling was conducted initially by professionals and later modified for peer counselors given the lack of nutritionists. High levels of food insecurity and overweight among PLHIV in LAC have important implications, since prior interventions to address food insecurity among PLHIV have focused on underweight and wasting. Formative research and intersectoral collaboration facilitated locally appropriate nutritional materials and interventions, enhanced local capacities, and helped incorporate nutritional guidelines into policies and practice. Addressing human capital constraints in resource-poor settings and developing complementary strategies were key recommendations.

Key nodes affecting patient satisfaction in a cross-regional referral service process: an empirical analysis study in Sichuan

BackgroundThe referral service is a significant component of healthcare reform in China, and the measurement of patient satisfaction with the referral service process will help to improve the quality of referral medical delivery. Furthermore, the referral service in China includes inter-institutional collaborations between hospitals at different levels and multi-nodes throughout the referral process. It is therefore necessary to identify the key nodes that affect patient satisfaction during the referral service process.MethodsThis study conducted a questionnaire survey of 110 patients to collect data regarding patient satisfaction at the following healthcare nodes: primary-level hospital, referral appointment registration, claim of appointment number in the outpatient department, examination service, admission service, and overall satisfaction during the referral service process. Correlation analysis and logistic regression methods were used to establish a mathematical model of patient satisfaction between five nodes and overall satisfaction. Additionally, a peak-end model was formed to identify the peak node impacting overall patient satisfaction during the referral service based on the sample data.ResultsOver 80% of referral patients rated the overall referral service as ‘good’. The correlation analysis revealed that there was a significant correlation between the satisfaction of each node and the overall satisfaction (P < 0.05). The results of the regression model showed that the satisfaction of five nodes determined the overall satisfaction and that “admission service at the higher-level hospital” exerted the greatest impact on overall satisfaction (β = 0.312), while “referral appointment registration” had the lowest influence on overall satisfaction (β = 0.177). The peak-end model also revealed that “admission service at the higher-level hospital” had a greater effect on overall satisfaction.ConclusionOur study showed that the key nodes affecting patient satisfaction were “transferring service at the primary-level hospital” and “admission service at the higher-level hospital”. Furthermore, the efficacy of the referral services is determined by the gatekeepers’ management of the referral system at the primary-level hospital and the allocation and management of bed resources at the higher-level hospital. These findings can serve as a science-based guidance for them to improve their performance in inter-regional healthcare collaborations in the referral service process.

A Practical Guide to Whole Slide Imaging: A White Paper From the Digital Pathology Association.

Whole slide imaging (WSI) represents a paradigm shift in pathology, serving as a necessary first step for a wide array of digital tools to enter the field. Its basic function is to digitize glass slides, but its impact on pathology workflows, reproducibility, dissemination of educational material, expansion of service to underprivileged areas, and intrainstitutional and interinstitutional collaboration exemplifies a significant innovative movement with far-reaching effects. Although the benefits of WSI to pathology practices, academic centers, and research institutions are many, the complexities of implementation remain an obstacle to widespread adoption. In the wake of the first regulatory clearance of WSI for primary diagnosis in the United States, some barriers to adoption have fallen. Nevertheless, implementation of WSI remains a difficult prospect for many institutions, especially those with stakeholders unfamiliar with the technologies necessary to implement a system or who cannot effectively communicate to executive leadership and sponsors the benefits of a technology that may lack clear and immediate reimbursement opportunity. To present an overview of WSI technology-present and future-and to demonstrate several immediate applications of WSI that support pathology practice, medical education, research, and collaboration. Peer-reviewed literature was reviewed by pathologists, scientists, and technologists who have practical knowledge of and experience with WSI. Implementation of WSI is a multifaceted and inherently multidisciplinary endeavor requiring contributions from pathologists, technologists, and executive leadership. Improved understanding of the current challenges to implementation, as well as the benefits and successes of the technology, can help prospective users identify the best path for success.

Standard growth and diarrhea-associated growth faltering in captive infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Reference growth studies of captive rhesus macaque infants have not accounted for diarrhea and the potential for growth stunting or growth faltering. Healthy infants without diarrhea could be used to build a standard growth chart and a tool used to detect growth faltering associated with diarrhea. We hypothesized infants who develop diarrhea during the first year of life would experience decreased linear weight gain compared to healthy infants, and we used healthy infants to establish standard growth of male and female infants. We hypothesized the lower 3rd percentile of standard growth would be cut-off criteria used in screening for diarrhea-associated growth faltering. Using a retrospective cohort of 6,510 infant weight records in a multiple linear regression, daily weight gain through the first year of life was determined by sex, housing type, and health status. Male standard growth was 4.1 g/day (95%CI: 4.0-4.2 g/day) in corrals and 4.7 g/day (95%CI: 4.5-4.8 g/day) in shelter housing. Female standard growth was 4.0 g/day (95%CI: 3.8-4.2 g/day) in corrals and 4.4 g/day (95%CI: 4.0-4.7 g/day) in shelter housing. Diarrhea was significantly associated with decreased linear weight gain by up to 34% during the first year of life. Odds of growth faltering of infants, defined as those falling below the 3rd percentile of standard growth, were at least 8.9 higher given a history of diarrhea compared to healthy. The growth faltering cut-off criteria had a sensitivity of at least 53% for males and females to screen for diarrhea in infants between 6 and 12 months in shelters housing. Interinstitutional collaborations of infant rhesus macaque weight records would refine the standard growth charts and cut-off criteria, and additional morphometric data would provide a more nuanced picture of growth stunting.

Collaborative Characteristics and Networks of National, Institutional and Individual Contributors Using Highly Cited Articles in Environmental Engineering in Science Citation Index Expanded

Collaboration has strongly intensified recently and its characteristics are attractive and multi-dimensional. This study explored the trends, characteristics and citation impact of collaboration as well as collaboration networks for the macrolevel of country, the mesolevel of institution and the microlevel of author, using highly cited articles in environmental engineering (EE) category of the Science Citation Index Expanded. A data visualization and manipulation software, Gephi 0.9.1 was used to visualize the relationships of collaboration among authors, institutions and countries. Although collaboration in general is known to be beneficial in many research areas, collaboration is not beneficial for highly cited research in the EE field. Single author, single country and single institution articles were more visible than articles involving international collaboration, inter-institutional collaboration and individual collaboration. There were certain group collaborations, which played an important role in publishing highly cited articles in the EE field.

Important institutions of interinstitutional scientific collaboration networks in materials science

Interinstitutional scientific collaboration plays an important role in knowledge production and scientific development. Together with the increasing scale of scientific collaboration, a few institutions that positively participate in interinstitutional scientific collaboration are important in collaboration networks. However, whether becoming an important institution in collaboration networks could be a contributing factor to research success and how these important institutions collaborate are still indistinct. In this paper, we identified the scientific institutions that possess the highest degree centrality as important institutions of an interinstitutional scientific collaboration network in materials science and examined their collaboration preferences utilizing several network measures. We first visualized the appearance of these important institutions that had the most positive collaborations in the interinstitutional scientific collaboration networks during the period of 2005---2015 and found an obvious scale-free feature in interinstitutional scientific collaboration networks. Then, we measured the advantages of being important in collaboration networks to research performance and found that positive interinstitutional collaborations can always bring both publication advantages and citation advantages. Finally, we identified two collaboration preferences of these important institutions in collaboration networks--one type of important institution represented by the Chinese Academy of Science plays an intermediary role between domestic institutions and foreign institutions with high betweenness centrality and a low clustering coefficient. This type of important institution has better performance in the number of publications. The other type of important institution represented by MIT tends to collaborate with similar institutions that have positive collaborations and possess a larger citation growth rate. Our finding can provide a better understanding of important institutions' collaboration preferences and have significant reference for government policy and institutional collaboration strategies.

Characteristics of scientific impact of Resources Conservation and Recycling in the past 30 years

This paper was designed as a complement to a previous study to give deeper insights into the characteristics of scientific impact of Resources Conservation and Recycling (RCR) over the past 30 years. Our study brought transparency to the impact trends of RCR, the role of information amounts and contributors, and the evolution of research emphases. The results showed that RCR has become more mainstream with greater influence in the scientific community. International collaboration, inter-institutional collaboration and co-authorship made increasing contributions to the RCR publications, where the collaboration between the USA and China has been the most prominent one. Interestingly, single institution or single country publications were found to obtain more citations than those of inter-institutional and inter-national collaboration, which is nevertheless in line with the fact that many of the former were published earlier than the latter. While the comparative analysis of author keywords and KeyWords Plus revealed the diversity and complexity of research focuses of RCR throughout the study period, RCR has retained its commitment to fueling the sustainability discourses that transcends various disciplinary boundaries. “Recycling” and “management” have long been the research focuses of RCR publications and their references. Overall, this paper presented a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of literature in RCR, which could serve as a reference for the journal editors, authors, reviewers, readers, the publisher, and those who are interested in the state of the art in relevant areas of research.