Teaching Art History to Design Students

Art History is often seen as a mandatory core course in the curricula of design programs but it is rarely tailored to the needs and goals of such programs. Instead, the traditional chronological organization of lecture topics, invariably beginning with the “Venus of Willendorf” (c. 25,000 BC) is presented in order to impart to the students a supposed holistic “big picture.” This essay outlines the re-structuring of a two-semester first-year faculty-wide introductory art history course, entitled “History of Art and Design,” in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design at Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey. The course was re-configured from a conventional chronologically-presented (time-oriented) lecture series to a thematically presented (topic-oriented) lecture series more relevant to the students of the faculty – architecture, interior architecture, graphic design, industrial design, and fashion design students.

Codeship: Financing growth: Case study and Teaching note

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Teaching ethics to employees of a state public utilities company in a developing country: A case study

Cette étude de cas est issue d’un module final de formation pour les employés du service public d’une agence de l’eau. Nous explorons les résultats de plusieurs stratégies utilisées pour souligner le besoin de changement dans les comportements individuels et institutionnels en vue d’améliorer les services aux clients. En particulier, nous explorons certaines manières d’ouvrir la discussion sur les pratiques de corruption de manière non-triviale sans offenser les sensibilités ou provoquer l’indifférence. Comme point de départ, il est demandé aux participants de relever les problèmes institutionnels qu’ils caractérisent comme éthiques, même si d’autres problèmes appartiennent à d’autres catégories identifiées plus tard. Pour éviter une approche purement théorique des devoirs et obligations envers les clients, ils sont dérivés de la mission de l’agence telle que définit par la loi qui l’a créée.

The value of using short-format podcasts to enhance learning and teaching

This paper presents the findings of a podcasting trial held in 2007-2008 within the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney, Australia. The trial investigates the value of using short-format podcasts to support assessment for postgraduate and undergraduate students. A multi-method approach is taken in investigating perceptions of the benefits of podcasting, incorporating surveys, focus groups and interviews. The results show that a majority of students believe they gained learning benefits from the podcasts and appreciated the flexibility of the medium to support their learning, and the lecturers felt the innovation helped diversify their pedagogical approach and support a diverse student population. Three primary conclusions are presented: (1) most students reject the mobile potential of podcasting in favour of their traditional study space at home; (2) what students and lecturers value about this podcasting design overlap; (3) the assessment-focussed, short-format podcast design may be considered a successful podcasting model. The paper finishes by identifying areas for future research on the effective use of podcasting in learning and teaching.

(How) Do research and administrative duties affect university professors’ teaching?

We analyze the interaction between university professors’ teaching quality and their research and administrative activities. Our sample is a high-quality individual panel data set from a medium size public Spanish university that allows us to avoid several types of biases frequently encountered in the literature. Although researchers teach roughly 20% more than non-researchers, their teaching quality is also 20% higher. Instructors with no research are 5 times more likely than the rest to be among the worst teachers. Over much of the relevant range, we find a nonlinear and positive relationship between research output and teaching quantity on teaching quality. Our conclusions may be useful for decision makers in universities and governments.

“Flipped Classroom” for Teaching Business Research in a Business Management Course

This presentation will report on a cross-department collaboration between the library and the business/economics department at Lehman College to conduct information literacy instruction as a “flipped classroom.”

The impact of structured teaching methods on the quality of education in Brazil

This paper estimates the impact of the use of structured methods on the quality of education for students in primary public school in Brazil. Structured methods encompass a range of pedagogical and managerial instruments applied in the educational system. In recent years, several municipalities in the state of Sao Paulo have contracted out private educational providers to implement these structured methods in their schooling systems. Their pedagogical proposal involves structuring of curriculum content, development of teacher and student textbooks, and the training and supervision of teachers anti instructors. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we find that the 4th- and 8th-grade students in the municipalities with structured methods performed better in Portuguese and mathematics than did students in municipalities not exposed to these methods. We find no differences in passing rates. A robustness test supports the assumption that there is no unobserved municipal characteristics associated with proficiency changes over time that may affect the results. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Excellence in business teaching: A quick start guide. Book Review

The article reviews the book "Excellence in Business Teaching: A Quick Start Guide," by Ellen Auster, Tina Grant, and Krista Wylie.

How Do We Teach Economics?

The teaching of economics in Hungary has changed fundamentally since the 1980s for two main reasons. Firstly, the transformation towards a market economy has changed the needs of students, and secondly, there has been a move to harmonise Hungarian methods of teaching with Western ones. The number of institutions involved in economics education has increased substantially to meet new demand and these institutions offer a wide range of programs, though the topics covered tend to be more practically based than previously. A survey of students set out to evaluate economics as a profession by investigating social esteem, financial compensation, career prospects, and mobility within the profession. Amongst full-time students there was a strong correlation between the parents' background and the students' career prospects. Full-time students were more optimistic than part-time students, although the latter had a higher opinion of the academic level of their educational establishments. A second survey, this time of economics teachers, revealed the disturbing fact that teachers rated themselves in the last but one position according to social esteem and felt that society had a poor opinion of them. Fifty percent expressed a desire to leave the profession and 70% supplemented their income with work outside their school, rarely within the domain of economics. The final part of the research analysed the situation in private educational institutions, nothing that unemployment retraining grants offered by the Ministry of Labour have created an incentive for private entrepreneurs to organise courses and that the quality of these courses varies considerably.

Teaching Time Preference and Human Impatience: The Billionaire Game

The Billionaire Game involves students in discussing time preference, or what Fisher (1930) calls human impatience. The game can facilitate the introduction of the material on present value and discounting or discussions on such issues as investment in human capital and the intertemporal consumption-saving decision. Thus, the game can facilitate discussions in a number of economics courses.

Multidisciplinary Learning, Another way of Teaching Maths in Engineering

Multidisciplinary training is widely appreciated in industry and business, and nevertheless usually is not addressed in the early stages of most undergraduate programs. We outline here a multidisciplinary course for undergraduates studying engineering in which mathematics would be the common language, the transverse tool. The goal is motivating students to learn more mathematics and as a result, improve the quality of engineering education. The course would be structured around projects in four branches in engineering: mechanical, electrical, civil and bio-tech. The projects would be chosen among a wide variety of topics in engineering practice selected with the guidance of professional engineers. In these projects mathematics should interact with at least two other basic areas of knowledge in engineering: chemistry, computers science, economics, design or physics.

Virtual science hub: an open source platform to enrich science teaching

This paper presents the Virtual Science Hub platform. It is an open source platform that combines a social network, an e-learning authoring tool, a videoconference service and a learning object repository for science teaching enrichment. These four main functionalities fit very well together. The platform was released in April 2012 and since then it has not stopped growing. Finally we present the results of the surveys conducted and the statistics gathered to validate this approach.