The Federal University of Minas Gerais (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais-UFMG), located in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, has been a committed partner of indigenous communities since 1996. This partnership began with the creation of spaces intended to elaborate and transform the traditional wisdom of these communities in favour of their…

This paper examines the need for interventions to support students who are taking advanced placement courses in small rural districts and describes the Facilitator Preparation Program (FPP) as a strategy to address this need. Issues in the delivery of Online Distance Education (ODE) in small rural schools are summarized and the conceptual…

This study identifies and examines multiple indicators to evaluate cultural competence of pre-service teachers in teacher education institutions. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education's concepts of culturally responsive teaching and theory discussions on cultural competence serve as the impetus for the study. The analysis applied…

Academic technologists at Lynn University (Florida) learned the hard way just how important a disaster recovery plan can be. Back in 2005, when Hurricane Wilma walloped the region with driving rain and 120 mile-per-hour winds, the storm debilitated Lynn's IT department, causing damage and flooding that thwarted the campus network for nearly two…

Fieldwork is considered central to an education as a physical geographer. However, there are doubts whether all students benefit from it equally. A preferred way of learning may have an influence upon its perceived value. Attitude surveys were administered to 1191 2nd- and 3rd-year physical geography undergraduates across 16 British universities.…

During the past three years, we have developed and implemented an enterprise information system (EIS) to reengineer and facilitate the administrative process for preparing and teaching distance learning courses in a midsized-to-large university (with 23,000 students). The outcome of the implementation has been a streamlined and efficient process…

A new professional credential, the Nationally Certified Educational Diagnostician (NCED), was established in 2006 for assessment specialists known as educational diagnosticians. The first cohort of 511 diagnosticians from 11 states received NCED certificates in January 2008. Discussed in this article are several issues of concern related to…

Two-way immersion schools provide a promising model for service delivery to students who are English language learners. With the goals of bilingualism, academic excellence, and cross cultural appreciation, these schools are designed to build bridges across linguistically heterogeneous student bodies. Yet while empirical evidence demonstrates that…

The importance of giving young people a say in casework has received much attention in recent years. Little attention, however, has been given to the question of how to educate youth workers as a way of ensuring young people's involvement in such professional practices. This paper reports on a model for preparing youth workers for participatory…

This article describes how food service providers and district administrators find creative ways to provide better meals as part of a healthier school food movement. Throughout the nation, food service providers have cut down on the amount of processed foods served to students by replacing these items with more fresh fruits and vegetables, whole…

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) has been considered to be one of the most versatile and appealing evaluation protocols available for human services. Aspects of the protocol that make the method so appealing to practitioners--that is, collaboratively working with individual clients to identify and assign weights to goals they will work to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss Irelands national apprenticeship programme, introduced in 1993, in the context of the country's evolving economic and social policies. Design/methodology/approach: A critical analysis is undertaken of the industrial climate in Ireland, which prevented the introduction of a national apprenticeship…

Context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is an innovative approach that integrates wireless, mobile, and context-awareness technologies to detect the situation of learners in the real world and provide adaptive support or guidance accordingly. In this paper, a context-aware u-learning environment is developed for guiding inexperienced…

This paper reviews some of the most popular policy evaluation methods in empirical microeconomics: social experiments, natural experiments, matching, instrumental variables, discontinuity design, and control functions. It discusses identification of traditionally used average parameters and more complex distributional parameters. The adequacy,…

For years, some universities have dreamed of border-defying online programs that vacuum up tuition dollars far beyond local students. But now a growing number of institutions are ramping up their efforts to attract working adults in their own backyards. Commuter-serving urban universities can not match the marketing muscle of faster-growing,…