Quality Enhancement In Higher Education Research Articles

Proposal of a Course-Classification Support System Using Deep Learning and its Evaluation When Combined with Reinforcement Learning

The National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education (NIAD-QE) awards academic degrees based on credit accumulation. These credits must be classified according to predetermined criteria for the selected disciplinary fields. This study was conducted by subcommittees within the Committee for Validation and Examination of Degrees, the members of which should be well-versed in the syllabus of each course to ensure appropriate classification. The number of applicants has been increasing annually, and thus, a course-classification system supported by information technology is strongly desired. We proposed a course-classification support system (CCS) and an active CCS system for awarding degrees in NIAD-QE. In contrast, in this study, we construct a CCS using deep learning, which has been significantly developed in recent years. We also propose a method “CLCNNwithXoL” combined with the reinforcement learning method. We evaluate its effectiveness using the data submitted.

Finding the right fit or fitting what is found? Contextualising connections between international student mobility and quality in teacher education

ABSTRACT The political promotion of international student mobility in the Nordic countries is underpinned by claims about its contribution to quality enhancement in higher education. Yet, this link is scarcely elaborated and is an understudied issue empirically. This article presents the findings of an interview study exploring the recontextualisation of this policy discourse by micro-level actors in Norwegian teacher education. Analytically, it employs quality perspectives to unpack the ideas that underlie the planning, learning process and envisioned outcomes associated with mobility. The article finds that quality is associated with clearly envisioned personal and professional outcomes of mobility; yet, it is also shaped by unclear notions about the learning process involved and constraints set by the practical possibilities for organising it. The article argues that the malleability of quality and the uneasy nature of student mobility in teacher education involves a risk that mobility becomes instrumentalised and loses its educational value.

Integrating Quality Function Deployment and Service Excellence for Educational Quality Enhancement in Higher Education

This article aims to analyze the integration of quality function deployment (QFD) and excellent service in improving the quality of education at STT Migas Balikpapan. This research uses a qualitative case study type approach. Data collection techniques are carried out through observation, interviews, and documentation. Data analysis is carried out circularly, starting with data collection, presentation, reduction, and conclusion. The results of this research show that integration of quality function deployment (QFD) and service excellence in order to improve the quality of education at STT Migas Balikpapan is carried out through the identification of customer needs, the transformation of needs into action plans, alignment with superior service, continuous measurement, and evaluation. The results of this research can provide practical guidance for higher education institutions in improving the quality of their education in a way that is more focused, responsive, and oriented to the needs of students and industry. It is hoped that integrating QFD and excellent service can become the basis for educational renewal in similar universities.

INTERNATIONALIZATION AS AN IMPACTFUL MEANS OF QUALITY UPGRADING OF HIGHER LEGAL EDUCATION

The compelling reason for the research is to justify the importance of internationalization for the quality improvement of higher legal education and to reveal a set of necessary measures as well. The question of internationalization of higher legal education as means for optimization is of great applicability for the universities of both Russian Federation and Republic of Qazaqstan aspiring for enhancing of their competitive capacity in the frameworks of international educational sphere. Complex goals and tasks required an interdisciplinary approach based on composition of gnoseology and synergy that facilitated fundamental analysis of the essence of internationalization and integration of legal education into international contemporary processes and allowed to combine legal and pedagogical methods in order to define the optimal internationalization strategy for quality enhancement of legal education. The article determines focus areas for internationalization of education on both state and university levels, indicates functions of the internationalization of legal education and establishes the cause-effect relation between the process of internationalization of legal education and successful politics of quality enhancement of higher education.

Reasons and trends in youth's suicide rates during the COVID-19 pandemic

SummaryBackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic posed many mental health challenges to youth through unprecedented infection control measures such as nationwide school closures. Despite this, few studies have investigated trends in suicide among youth during the pandemic, let alone their reasons.MethodsPopulation-level data on crude monthly suicide rates (2016–2021) and reasons of suicide (2018–2020) among youth aged 10-19 years were obtained from the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the National Police Agency, respectively. Using an event study design (with a Poisson regression model to calculate changes-in-changes (CiC) estimates) and interrupted time series analysis, we investigated changes in monthly suicide rates during the first 12 months of the pandemic (May 2020 to April 2021) compared to pre-pandemic levels (May 2016 to March 2020). Additionally, we investigated the changes in reasons of suicide (family-related, mental illness, social concerns, and academic concerns).FindingsIn the event study analysis, suicide rates among youth increased during the pandemic relative to pre-pandemic levels, especially between August-November 2020 (e.g., ratio of the suicide rate in November 2020 relative to previous years, 1.86; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.30 to 2.66). Though suicide levels returned closer to pre-pandemic levels by December 2020, they remained slightly elevated into 2021. In the interrupted time series analysis, suicide rates increased from May to August 2020 (0.099 cases per 100,000 youth per month; 95% CI, 0.022 to 0.176), followed by a decrease from September to December 2020 (-0.086 cases per 100,000 youth per month; 95% CI, -0.164 to -0.009). We observed elevated suicide rates for all major reasons from summer to autumn 2020, especially suicides attributed to family-related problems and social concerns. Furthermore, rates of suicides attributed to mental illness remained higher than pre-pandemic levels into December 2020.InterpretationSuicide rates among youth remained slightly elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels into 2021. The reasons of the increase in suicide rates were multifactorial, including mental health issues and disruptions in social relationships. During a pandemic, interventions that provide mental support as well as opportunities for regular social interactions to youth may be beneficial.FundingNorwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education.

Revised NAAC Accreditation Framework and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education

Revised NAAC Accreditation Framework and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education

An architecture of the information collected from higher education institutions by NIAD-QE

We reconsider the architecture of the information collected from higher education institutions by the National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education (NIAD-QE) and analyze its character. NIAD-QE periodically collects educational information, evidence-based documents, and self-assessment reports to enhance the quality of higher education, which are in a broad sense used to support university reform. These data represent a collection of organizational information gathered by observing higher education institutions in which, to collect the facts about organizational members, the data are aggregated in tabulated form. However, we find that this is not as efficient a way of conveying the information content in a limited data size as the original individual data sets.

A comparison of three major instruments used for the assessment of university student experience: Toward a comprehensive and distributed approach

AbstractHigher education's rapid expansion is paired with growing social expectations of its benefits and concern on its teaching quality. In response to these, institutional/national surveys based on an array of theories are widely used in universities for quality assurance, enhancement, and benchmarking. This paper reviews three major types of instruments used for such purposes, including two distinct schools of theory that have guided the development of such assessment in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom and then spread to the other parts of the world. The theories shaping the development of the two instruments, the dimensions assessed, and the challenges and criticisms involved when using such instruments for quality assurance are each discussed. This review concludes with a call for comparisons of different lines of research in this area, discussions on student learning experience that include more diverse characterizations of student experience across different educational contexts, development of tools to enable distributed leadership among teachers, and encouragement of students as partners for quality enhancement in higher education.

Hate speech in intercultural encounters

The issue of hate speech has been a topic of international debate—most frequently in the domains of law, philosophy and language. Different issues linked to changes in society, ranging from the proliferation of social media, innovation and technology and influx of fake news, disinformation and propaganda to the rise of nationalism, far-right movements, increased cross-border movement of people and transnational business have made studying the conceptual and practical aspects of hate speech in different contexts ever more important. The papers in this issue focus on the sociolinguistic aspects of the use of hate speech and its different variants in online communication, offering a much-needed perspective on how hate speech in digital communication can be identified and tackled. For example, Dr. Manana Ruseishvili and Dr. Rusudan Dolidze analyse hate speech in computer-meditated communication, focusing on the polylogal, asynchronic remarks made by members of the public reacting to articles in online media or press releases about the LGBT pride event planned for June 2019. The research carried out by Lilit Bekaryan explores how hateful posts and comments can start among Facebook users, and studies the language means employed in their design based on data from more than ten open Facebook pages managed by popular Armenian figures, such as media experts, journalists, politicians and bloggers. Dr. Tatjana R. Felberg explores the interconnectedness between impoliteness and hate speech in online comments in Croatia and Serbia by applying impoliteness theory and a critical discourse analysis framework. Her research demonstrates that those who post often fluctuate between hate speech and impoliteness. Dr. Ayunts and Dr. Paronyan provide a comparative analysis of manifestations of hate speech and euphemisms in Armenian and British online media outlets and social sites targeting people's sexual orientation with emphasis on the interconnectedness of hate speech and culture. This issue was prepared as part of the project ‘Intercultural encounters in academia and work places in South Caucasus and Norway’ funded by DIKU, the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education. The project partner universities are Oslo Metropolitan University, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Yerevan State University and Khazar University.

Matching Accounting Curricula with Market Demands: A Study on the University of Rajshahi in Bangladesh

The study strived to explore whether the accounting curricula of the University of Rajshahi fit the needs of both domestic and foreign job markets. To accomplish this purpose, we prepared five sets of Likert-type structured questionnaires and administered them to stakeholders viz faculties, students, alumni, non-academic staff, and employers. The Higher Education Quality Enhancement Program (HEQEP) of the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh provided the questionnaires. The study found a notable gap between the courses and content covered in the accounting curricula and the skills acquired by the graduates as well their skills and needs of the job market. The Department of Accounting and Information Systems of the University developed the accounting curricula without any participation of its stakeholders and professional body members. Faculties designed curricula, but it was just routine work. Recently it has mandatory to include a member from alumni, employers, and professionals in the curriculum committee. But they have very little freedom to exercise their rights and give inputs to a curriculum to meet the needs of the job market. Moreover, the prevailing lecture-based teaching-learning pedagogy and exam-based assessment practiced by universities expand the gap. The study recommends proper representation of stakeholders in the curricula Committee and designing market-led forward-looking curricula for accounting programs giving emphasis on information technology and taking into account the demands of the prevailing and prospective job markets.

Conceptualizing the systemic evaluation of dashboards in quality enhancement processes in higher education

AbstractThe article highlights the need for improvement in the evaluation of dashboard implementations intended to support quality processes in higher education and proposes a systems thinking framework for this improvement. A review of the literature on quality enhancement processes in higher education and dashboards research highlights that quality enhancement in higher education might be more appropriately understood through the lens of complexity management. The Viable Systems Model is argued to be useful for this purpose and, in terms of the role of dashboards in supporting these processes, encourages focus on their role in supporting communication and information flow for effective decision‐making for adaptation. Some initial systems modelling is conducted to illustrate how the application of the model could guide evaluation, providing the foundation for case study evaluation and research.

The Triggers for Internationalization and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education of France

The article analyzes the internationalization strategies and the quality assurance systems of France and Université de Lorraine. It has been found out that the goals, proposed in the national and institutional internationalization strategies, include strengthening policies to improve the reception of international students, young researchers and staff.
 It has been noted that Haut Conseil de l'évaluation de la recherche et de l'enseignement supérieur and Université de Lorraine are partners in the project «Implementation of Education Quality Assurance System via Cooperation of University-Business-Government in Higher Education Institutions» (EDUQAS Project), aiming at improving education quality assurance systems through the development of efficient internal quality standards leading to graduates’ better employability in partner countries.
 Haut Conseil de l'évaluation de la recherche et de l'enseignement supérieur and Commission des Titres d’Ingénieur are authorized to conduct international accreditations of study programs. Université de Lorraine Délégation à l’Aide au Pilotage et à la Qualité promotes a culture of continuous improvement and organizational development based on the tools of quality management and process control.
 It has been noted that participation in EDUQAS Project stimulates further development of QA systems at the national and institutional levels; wider participation of stakeholders in higher education quality enhancement and internationalization; higher education quality monitoring through stakeholders’ surveys; monitoring graduates’ career paths in partner countries.
 The legislative basis, internationalization strategies and quality assurance institutions at the national and institutional levels, networks of stakeholders involved in internationalization and quality assurance processes, participation in the international projects have been identified to be triggers for internationalization and quality enhancement in higher education of France.

What Brings International Students to Norway?

What Brings International Students to Norway?

Academic audit-a benchmark for quality enhancement in higher education

Academic audit-a benchmark for quality enhancement in higher education

A Transatlantic Approach to Teaching and Learning about Norwegian Migration to the United States

133 t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g A Transatlantic Approach to Teaching and Learning about Norwegian Migration to the United States Jens Johan Hyvik and Kyle Ward During the spring semester of 2019 a group of students at Minnesota State University , Mankato (MSU), and the University of South-­ Eastern Norway (USN)1 took a course entitled Norwegian Migration to the United States, co-­ taught by Kyle Ward (MSU) and Jens Johan Hyvik (USN). The course was part of a project funded by Diku (the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education) under the partnership program for North America. The purpose of this grant was to enable the institutions to offer co-­taught courses that students from both universities could enroll in, as well as offer the students a unique educational experience by including Norwegian and American students in the same 134 teaching and learning course. All of this would be done while still allowing students to continue their regular coursework at their home institutions. In this article, we will discuss the experiences we had creating this course, as well as how the students experienced the course based on their evaluations. In sum: despite needing to overcome several logistical hurdles, the students and professors came away with positive teaching and learning experiences. The hybrid nature of the course, including perhaps most importantly study time in each country , enhanced U.S. and Norwegian students’ knowledge of the history of Norwegian migration as well as contributed to their better understanding of Norwegian and American politics and culture more generally. The Origins of the Course To begin, it is necessary to discuss the origins of the course and its eventual organization . The first contacts that led to the cooperation between the history departments at MSU and USN were made in 2016 when a delegation from USN (Nils Ivar Agøy, Herleik Baklid, and Jens Johan Hyvik) visited the history faculty at MSU. One of the main reasons the delegation from USN reached out to the faculty at MSU is because these two institutions already had an institutional agreement that allowed for some exchange programs between the two schools. From the start of our meetings in 2016, it seemed like there was a good institutional “match” between MSU and USN, both on an institutional level and an academic level in the respective history departments. MSU and the newly merged USN have approxi­ mately the same size student populations and they share a number of similar majors that prepare students for professional jobs. Both MSU and USN’s history departments offer history majors, in addition to having a strong focus on teacher education. MSU offers a large social studies education program, as well as a master ’s program in history, and USN offers a graduate Master of Teacher Education program, or “lektorprogam,” in history. In 2017 the Norwegian Center for Internationalization of Education, SiU (now Diku) published a call for projects under the Partnership Program with North America. Together MSU and USN developed a project we called the Partnership 135 a transatlantic approach Program in History. Jens Johan Hyvik was the project manager and coordinator from USN and Kyle Ward served as the coordinator from MSU. The project consisted of two activities: 1. Develop a course about Norwegian emigration to the United States to be co-­ taught by professors from the two universities and include two study-­ abroad trips, one to the United States and one to Norway. 2. Run a pilot program where student-­ teacher candidates from MSU could have a field experience teaching in a Norwegian school and Norwegian students who wanted to go to Minnesota could similarly gain classroom experience. To meet the demands of the teacher exchange, Nøtterøy High School and Mankato West High School were included in the project as Network Partners. While the focus of this article is the development of the Norwegian Migration to the United States course, it is worth mentioning that the student-­ teacher exchange has been far more successful than we originally expected. Our hope was to send one student each way, but by the end of...

Changing Learning Environment and Electronic Resources

Today’s world totally runs with Information, All societies run with the association of modern ICT tools.Due to changing context, learning and teaching environment is also drastically changing. Electronic resources (e-resources) have become very popular among the scholarly community of the world and libraries are no exception. Today, the academic libraries are procuring more and more e-resources for the satisfaction of their users. All libraries try to provide quick and effective service for their users ata low cost in the least time. In changing context E-resources play a vital role in the quality enhancement of higher education. In this paper,it is tried to reflect various dimensions of E-resources used by the student of the Social Science and Humanities disciplines of Dibrugarh University.

Construction of consistency judgment system of diploma policy and curriculum policy using character‐level CNN

AbstractHigher education institutions or universities secure the quality of their education in order to build the confidence of stakeholders. In the mechanism of quality assurance, it is necessary to handle an enormous amount of text data related to their education activities. National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education conducts a research for quality assurance to analyze the text data of their admission, curriculum, and diploma policies. An effective support system for text information processing by using information technology is desired. In this paper, we will consider the mechanism of preliminary system using character‐level convolutional neural networks to judge the consistency between diploma policy and curriculum policy.

BioDATA: Biodiversity data mobilisation and data publication training in Eurasia

BioDATA (Biodiversity Data for Internationalisation in Higher Education) is an international project to develop and deliver biodiversity data training for undergraduate and postgraduate students from Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Ukraine. By training early career (student) biodiversity scholars, we aim at turning the current academic and education biodiversity landscape into a more open-data-friendly one. Professional practitioners (researchers, museum curators, and collection managers involved in data publishing) from each country were also invited to join the project as assistant teachers (mentors). The project is developed by the Research School in Biosystematics - ForBio and the Norwegian GBIF-node, both at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and partners from each of the target countries. The teaching material is based on the GBIF curriculum for data mobilization and all students will have the opportunity to gain the respective GBIF certification. All materials are made freely available for reuse and even in this very early phase of the project, we have already seen the first successful reuse of teaching materials among the project partners. The first BioDATA training event was organized in Minsk (Belarus) in February 2019 with the objective to train a minimum of four mentors from each target country. The mentor-trainees from this event will help us to teach the course to students in their home country together with teachers from the project team. BioDATA mentors will have the opportunity to gain GBIF certification as expert mentors which will open opportunities to contribute to future training events in the larger GBIF network. The BioDATA training events for the students will take place in Dushanbe (Tajikistan) in June 2019, in Minsk (Belarus) in November 2019, in Yerevan (Armenia) in April 2020, and in Kiev (Ukraine) in October 2020. Students from each country are invited to express their interest to participate by contacting their national project partner. We will close the project with a final symposium at the University of Oslo in March 2021. The project is funded by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU).

BioDATA - Biodiversity Data for Internationalisation in Higher Education

BioDATA is an international project on developing skills in biodiversity data management and data publishing. Between 2018 and 2021, undergraduate and postgraduate students from Armenia, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Ukraine, have an opportunity to take part in the intensive courses to become certified professionals in biodiversity data management. They will gain practical skills and obtain appropriate knowledge on: international data standards (Darwin Core); data cleaning software, data publishing software such as the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), and preparation of data papers. Working with databases, creating datasets, managing data for statistical analyses and publishing research papers are essential for the everyday tasks of a modern biologist. At the same time, these skills are rarely taught in higher education. Most of the contemporary professionals in biodiversity have to gain these skills independently, through colleagues, or through supervision. In addition, all the participants familiarize themselves with one of the important international research data infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The project is coordinated by the University of Oslo (Norway) and supported by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The project is funded by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU).

Abstract 4699: Identification of novel potential biomarkers of response to sunitinib in glioblastoma

Abstract Introduction: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most advanced and aggressive form of primary malignant brain tumors in adults. O6-Methylguanine methyltransferase (MGMT) is a DNA repair protein well known for its role in resistance to temozolomide used in standard treatment of patients newly diagnosed with GBM. Sunitinib is an oral multitargeting receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) inhibitor with antiangiogenic and antiproliferative activities targeting several RTKs. Our group has previously shown the role of MGMT as a negative regulator of angiogenesis and invasion and the differential antiproliferative effect of sunitinib based on expression of MGMT in GBM. Recent gene expression profiling (GEP) studies showed that besides its effects on RTKs, sunitinib affects the expression level of other genes at the transcriptional level in different cancer types. We hypothesized that: (i) the mechanism of action of sunitinib may not be limited to direct inhibition of its known targets (RTKs) in GBM and (ii) expression of MGMT may affect response of GBM tumor cells to sunitinib. We performed GEP analysis to identify genes that could be potentially modulated in response to sunitinib in GBM cell lines isogenic for MGMT. Empty vector (EV)-transfected T98/EV cells with constitutive expression of MGMT and its knockdown counterpart T98/MGMT-shRNA were treated with sunitinib or vehicle control. Treatment of T98/EV and T98/MGMT-shRNA cell lines with sunitinib significantly changed the expression of over 2,000 gene transcripts (analysis performed at Genome Quebec Innovation center, McGill University). Lists of significant genes were fitted into previously known biochemical pathways, available among the canonical pathways from various databases provided by ConsensusPathDB (CPDB). Strikingly, immune system was among the top significantly enriched pathways (p-value<10-3), with some immune pathways not previously reported for response to sunitinib. Conclusion: Our study opens new avenues to further understand the mechanisms of action of sunitinib, investigate its immunomodulatory effects, and identify biomarkers for selection of patients who might benefit from the combination of antiangiogenic and immunebased strategies in GBM. Funding Acknowledgment: Cancer Research Society Operating Grant Competition #22716, and Higher Education Quality Enhancement Project (HEQEP)- Window -4 (Grant Id. CP-4023), University Grant Commission (UGC), Bangladesh. Citation Format: Abu Shadat Mohammod Noman, Bassam Abdulkarim, Siham Sabri. Identification of novel potential biomarkers of response to sunitinib in glioblastoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2018; 2018 Apr 14-18; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 4699.