The character of professional development offered to those who teach in higher education is changing. There is a shift towards the adoption of more flexible, work-based, apprenticeship models, where ...experiential routes are increasingly valued. This paper seeks to understand the factors that impact engagement in academic professional development. A quantitative study reveals that experience, years of service, and discipline have little impact on educators' professional development preferences, nor on the recognition of individual needs and contextual nuances to ensure optimal engagement in academic professional development. We demonstrate that it is not possible to profile professional development pathways in these ways, thus strengthening the evidence base for a flexible approach to it.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
There are many levels of learning, training, and upskilling within SMEs and these encapsulate varying combinations of formal and informal learning activities. However not all SMEs are proactive in ...their learning situations and a large proportion of SMEs are in constant ‘crisis management’ mode and therefore need to be encouraged to adopt a learning, training and upskilling environment if they want to survive and prosper. Recent research managed by the Programme for University and Industry Interface at the University of Limerick, Ireland (PUII in Available on line at:
http://www.ul.ie/~puii/
(accessed January 21st, 2008)) was charged with identifying key skills and competencies required by individuals in SMEs to ensure their future generation employability. What clearly emerged from this piece of work was the articulation of a range of diverse interventions, which SMEs feel are required to enable them to expand their organizational capacity and the capability of their employees. However, the learning delivery models developed to date for the upskilling of individuals in industry have largely failed to get to the heart of the matter for the SME and are not sufficient to bridge the gap between the needs of the individual in the SME and the needs of the organization. To this end, SME-specific learning delivery models are urgently required to build and create innovative and sustainable learning environments in SMEs, which will simultaneously develop both the individual and the organization. This paper discusses the needs of SMEs in terms of learning and illuminates the need for new innovative programmes which will mark a new step in supporting the delivery on the global priority of educating and upskilling the workforce.
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CEKLJ, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
In order to remain successful and competitive in business today it is important that SMEs can sustain themselves by adapting to economic changes. SMEs have a distinct advantage over large companies ...in that they have less bureaucracy and hierarchical restrictions and can implement changes quickly. However often they are slow to change their way of doing business and collaborate. Through implementing training collaboration is facilitated which allows SMEs to discover new ways of doing business and practical methods of implementing these. This paper emphasises the importance of training and collaboration in sustaining SMEs going forward and outlines methods that SMEs can use to collaborate and learn to enhance their business.
Globalization has strong contradictory impacts on SMEs. The sharp increase of worldwide competition in recent decades weakened SMEs right across the board. At the same time, globalization offers many ...new opportunities and the importance of SMEs has increased. Opportunities include the potential to act as collaborators in multi-enterprise consortia, for international clients and partners. Their importance has increased because of their specific potential, such as high specialization and the ability to react faster than big enterprises. Therefore, it is important for such companies to take up the challenge to operate on a global scale. To be able to play this role, SMEs have to tackle change and develop their learning processes on a far-reaching scale. This article takes a closer look at the situation of European SMEs and presents findings from recent European projects identifying the ongoing problems in the adoption of new forms of learning. Secondly, this article discusses learning approaches and web-based technologies particularly suitable for SMEs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the demand for new modes of teaching and learning. One such approach is Hybrid-Flexible or HyFlex. Utilising a HyFlex model, teachers teach students at the same time ...face-to-face (f2f) and synchronously online through video-conferencing software while enabling other students to engage in asynchronous learning. Designing, developing and facilitating multiple modes of participation in HyFlex is a challenging endeavor which calls for specialized pedagogical knowledge, competencies and skills. To date, there is a dearth of literature which explores the pedagogies that integrate physical and virtual learning spaces to successfully support the HyFlex learning environment. One of the most widely adopted pedagogies during the pandemic was the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model which focuses on presence as a concept and how social, cognitive, teacher and emotional presence can support student learning in an online environment. The paper analyses the literature to explore the meaning of presence and CoI in a hyflex learning environment. It explores the role of the teacher in designing the optimum learning environment for students. However the role of presence in a hybrid learning environment has not been explored. This paper argues that teachers need to understand how students exist in learning spaces and how the can be co-present in physical, synchronous and asynchronous spaces to enable them to ensure equitable access and design inclusive hyflex learning environments.
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