Part-time Master Research Articles

Teaching Programming at a Distance: The Internet Software Visualization Laboratory

This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and through surface mail. Through our empirical studies and experience teaching the course we have identified four current problems: (i) students' difficulty mapping between the graphical representations used in the course and the programs to which they relate, (ii) the lack of a conversational context for tutor help provided over the telephone, (iii) helping students who due to their other commitments tend to study at 'unsociable' hours, and (iv) providing software for the constantly changing and expanding range of platforms and operating systems used by students. We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports individual exploration, and both synchronous and asynchronous communication. As a single user, students are aided by the extra mappings provided between the graphical representations used in the course and their computer programs, overcoming the problems of the original notation. ISVL can also be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution, a far richer alternative to technical discussions over the telephone. Finally, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Our planned experiments with ISVL will allow us to investigate ways in which new technology can be most appropriately applied in the service of distance education. Reviewers: Chris Johnson (U. Glasgow), Henry Lieberman (MIT Media Lab), Lisa Neal (EDS & MIT Media Lab), Judith Segal (U. Surrey) Interactive elements: Java applets allow you to play back and interact with ISVL movies in a distance programming student-tutor scenario. An interactive demonstration of ISVL is embedded in this article as a Java applet. You will require a Java-aware browser to use this. -->

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Creative international networking towards academic nursing education and research in The Netherlands

This article describes the changes occurring in nursing education in The Netherlands. The key factors influencing this process are addressed. Nurse education in The Netherlands still takes place mainly in hospital schools of nursing. In 1972 an important innovation was realized when the first two undergraduate nursing education programmes were started within institutions for higher education. Today there are 18 such programmes in the country and since 1980 there is also one graduate programme at the University of Maastricht. Another major event occurred in 1986 when the University of Utrecht and the local School for Higher Education together initiated the development of a graduate programme in nursing education. A collaborative master's degree course was created with the University of Wales, United Kingdom. Meanwhile, three Dutch universities have joined efforts and are presently working together with regional schools for higher professional education on a national plan. The aims are to establish (part-time) master and doctoral degree programmes in nursing and academic nursing research within the next few years.

Fear, Dependence and Loss of Self-Esteem: Affective Barriers in Second Language Learning Among Adults

The authors wished to monitor the attitudes of adults required to undertake the study of a foreign language. The requirement was part of a postgraduate degree. The subjects were virtual monolingual English speakers, with one exception. They were adult professional people taking a part-time Master's degree in Migration Studies. They were required to take two semesters of a foreign language of which they had no prior knowledge.

What Rewards do Australians say They Want from their Job?: A Comparative Study

Work motivators of early and mid-career personnel are central to human resource administration. Among others, multinational organisations need to know, "How unique is the structure of Australian work- reward preferences?" A tentative answer derives from a comparison of Australian and American thirtyish executives who are pursuing a part-time Master of Business Administration (MBA) program.

Sell-out or challenge? The contradiction of a masters in women's studies

This is an account of planning a part-time Masters degree in Women's Studies at a British Polytechnic. We explain how we obtained approval from the necessary authorities for the course, and discuss the conflict between—on the one hand—the need to conform to these institutional procedures in order to get the course established, and—on the other hand—the desire to keep faith with the political origins of Women's Studies in the Women's Movement. We discuss a number of major issues which have confronted the members of the committee responsible for planning this course including the struggle to demonstrate within the college the academic legitimacy of WS; decisions about what kind of course to offer students—a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary curriculum, with or without optional elements—and how to defend these proposals during the lengthy process of seeking formal approval; the institutional politics of launching the course; and anticipated problems associated with the eventual teaching of the course.