Resource For Academic Researchers Research Articles

What Research Should Vocational Education Colleges Conduct? An Empirical Study Using Data Envelopment Analysis

Higher vocational education (HVE) aims to cultivate high-quality technical and skilled talents so that the educated have the professional ethics, scientific culture, professional knowledge, technical skills, and other comprehensive professional qualities and action abilities required for engaging in a specific profession to achieve sustainable career development. Two problems related to critical management strategies for sustainable development activated this study: Should HVE colleges conduct academic research? What types of research should HVE colleges do? This article attempts to empirically study the second question while affirming the answer to the first question. HVE colleges focus on talent cultivation, which does not mean they will never engage in academic research. The key is to decide and evaluate the research types for HVE colleges. First, a survey was conducted on the current status and practical needs of HVE colleges globally and especially in China, and it was found that there is a mutually beneficial relationship between teaching and research in HVE colleges. Then, the positioning of HVE colleges for academic research was analyzed from three aspects—research type, performance assessment, and combination comparison—and three types of research positioning were proposed, i.e., applied research type, educational research type, and comprehensive research type. Then, three assessment index systems of academic research positioning types were designed from two input and output levels, and a research performance assessment model was established using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Finally, taking 22 vocational colleges in Shanghai as examples, a comparative study was conducted on the assessment results of three research types to determine the research types of different HVE colleges. Based on their educational history and academic research resources, HVE colleges can choose their research types. The HVE management department can guide HVE colleges to conduct differentiated academic research and support teaching and talent cultivation through input–output analysis for sustainable educational and teacher development.

Mapping the evolution of Canada’s wind energy fleet

This paper describes the development of a data set mapping all commercial wind turbines in Canada: the 9th largest onshore wind energy fleet in the world. Details contained in the data enable the analysis of the evolution of commercially deployed wind turbines as well as the illustrating the effects of the introduction and cessation of different policies affected historical deployment. In total, over 6700 turbines spanning more than 265 projects and nearly 14.0 GW of generating capacity were indexed including coordinates, model, manufacturer, owner, tower height and commissioning date. Data were compiled from publicly available sources including planning documents, technical reports, environmental impact studies and acoustic emission reports. In 2021, average rotor diameters were 140 m with 108 m tall towers, more than triple the average diameter and double the average tower height from 20 years ago. The analysis of this data found that a typical wind farm in Canada consists of 0.97 turbines/km2, while the typical installed capacity density has recently jumped from around 1 to 2.94 MW/km2 in 2021. Competitive procurement policies have often trended towards larger installed capacities, whereas smaller wind farms emerged more often when policies directed at community ownership were in place. Policies that encouraged local manufacturing developed regional clusters of particular manufacturers, but generally ceased after the local manufacturing policies ended. This work serves as a benchmark for the evolution of wind energy in Canada and a framework for similar data sets in other jurisdictions, and provides a resource for academic researchers, wind farm developers, government bodies and planning agencies as well as the general public.

Knowledge and Use of Uniuyo Website by Academics of the University of Uyo, Nigeria

College and university websites serve a myriad of purposes. They are a resource for academic research, a hub for current students and a source of news for alumni. Moreover, websites offer great significance in the level of overall corporate performance and achievement, providing at the same time, improved nature of memorable experience with the institution by stakeholders. The University of Uyo is not left out in this experience as it hosts a website named www.uniuyo.edu.ng. This study assessed the extent of knowledge of academic staff about the website and found out their perceptions, gratifications and challenges of the academics regarding the website. It found that majority of the academic staff were aware of the existence of the website, perceived it as an information source that was easy to use, accessible and interactive. The academics used the website majorly as a means of sending and receiving information internally and for collaborations with colleagues outside the university as well as for research purposes. However, poor /unavailability of network, dated information as well as low computer skills among other factors majorly impeded their optimal utilization of the website. The study recommended that university management works towards increasing the availability of network and sustain access, interactivity as well as offer periodic training to academics on website usage.

“Lets talk about you …”

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on the creation of innovative methods for engaging in conversations about everyday risk. Design/methodology/approach A range of methods from conventional survey research to open-ended, semi-structured conversations and focus groups were used in the series of studies that serve as the subject of this meta-study. The meta-study uses participant observation, key informant interviews and project reports to narrate and evaluate the evolution of Frontline as an action planning, monitoring, advocacy and research tool. Findings The Views from the Frontline (VFL) methods began as the bottom-up mirror of a top-down monitoring approach used by the United Nations (Hyogo Framework for Action Monitor). Limitations of such bottom up monitoring led to creation of guidelines for formalising local knowledge resulting from actions – Action at the Frontline (AFL) and, later, Frontline, a flexible tool for eliciting experiences of everyday risk. The earlier VFL monitoring approach had shared outsiders’ assumptions about the nature of the “problem” and limited the degree to which local residents could express their own experiences and priorities. Originality/value Extensive use of this suite of methods has shown that civil society organisations are fully capable of conducting credible research when properly supported and motivated. Use of these methods has so far provided strong support for policy advocacy at the global scale, has had moderate success in liaison with national policy makers and slow but promising results as a learning/action tool at the local scale. Frontline has as yet untapped potential as a resource for academic research.

Empowering Students to Make Sense of an Information Saturated World: The Evolution of Information Searching and Analysis

How well students conduct research online is an increasing concern for educators at all levels but especially higher education. The paper describes the evolution of a course that grew from a unit within a course to a whole course that examines confirmation bias, information searching and the political economy of information as keys to becoming more information and media literate. After a key assignment in which students assess their own tendency to engage in confirmation bias, students choose a social justice issue to investigate across web, news and academic research resources. Designed to build good analytical skills in assessing the trustworthiness of a variety of sources of information, the course empowers students as researchers, citizens and consumers.

Neurotree: A Collaborative, Graphical Database of the Academic Genealogy of Neuroscience

Neurotree is an online database that documents the lineage of academic mentorship in neuroscience. Modeled on the tree format typically used to describe biological genealogies, the Neurotree web site provides a concise summary of the intellectual history of neuroscience and relationships between individuals in the current neuroscience community. The contents of the database are entirely crowd-sourced: any internet user can add information about researchers and the connections between them. As of July 2012, Neurotree has collected information from 10,000 users about 35,000 researchers and 50,000 mentor relationships, and continues to grow. The present report serves to highlight the utility of Neurotree as a resource for academic research and to summarize some basic analysis of its data. The tree structure of the database permits a variety of graphical analyses. We find that the connectivity and graphical distance between researchers entered into Neurotree early has stabilized and thus appears to be mostly complete. The connectivity of more recent entries continues to mature. A ranking of researcher fecundity based on their mentorship reveals a sustained period of influential researchers from 1850–1950, with the most influential individuals active at the later end of that period. Finally, a clustering analysis reveals that some subfields of neuroscience are reflected in tightly interconnected mentor-trainee groups.

Mapping the Towns: English Heritage's Urban Survey and Characterisation Programme

Since 1992, English Heritage has been supporting a major programme of map-based survey, analysis and characterisation of urban landscapes in England. There are three main strands in this work: intensive surveys (involving the creation of Urban Archaeological Databases) for the historic cores of thirty-five major historic towns and cities; surveys of smaller towns on a county-by-county basis (Extensive Urban Survey); and a modified version of Extensive Urban Survey, drawing heavily on Historic Landscape Characterisation methodology, for major industrial conurbations, such as Merseyside and the Black Country. Over half the country (some 700 individual towns) has now been covered by this work.This paper outlines the context and aims of the programme; describes the methodologies being used; reviews progress to date; and highlights the value of the surveys as a resource for academic research as well as for conservation and planning.